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Photograph from Colt-Alber Chautauqua System

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CHAUTAUQUA lecturer must talk to his audience just as fast as he can move his mouth. Don't give them time to think. If you do, they'll begin to think about those preserves on the back of the stove, or that girl waiting on the corner, and you'll lose your audience. As for your message to them, they'll have all the next day to think about that!"

This blunt advice, given to me by the circuit manager of a Western Chautauqua, I can recommend to all other lecturers. A man may be a seasoned speaker with an unbroken record of triumphs at after-dinner speaking or lyceum platform oratory, and yet fail flatly when it comes to talking under the big tent.

The first and main reason for this is the tent. Open at all sides, it offers the members of the audience views of various distractions which compete with the lecturer for their attention. The pranks of small boys at one side, at another side the appearance of the Hollister family rolling up the street in their new car which every one knows they cannot afford, and the sight of a cool grassy nook beneath large elms in the rear of the tent, all invite the members of the audience to wander from the canvas hall either in mind or in body.

The mixed nature of the Chautauqua audience is the second reason for the difficulties of those who attempt to "put the talk in Chautauqua." A more heterogeneous audience you could not find than the crowd which sits under the average brown tent. The ninety-yearolds are there and the nine-month-olds. There is probably no Chautauqua circuit in this country which would succeed if you barred babies from the tents. For Chautauqua is essentially a family institution, and the farmer's wife cannot leave the house unless she takes her baby with her.

Since he is taking to a mixed audience, the speaker must confine himself to a "popular lecture," of which the old definition is still, perhaps, the best one, namely, "five parts of sense and five parts of nonsense." The Chautauqua is no place for a lecturer with an involved technical subject. Neither is it any place for a lecturer with a weak voice. The acoustics of a building of canvas are naturally inferior to those of a building of wood or stone. And with the building of canvas, open on all sides, no speaker can succeed unless he has a voice capable of competing with the cries of the children who are always playing in the rear of Chautauqua tents and the honking of automobiles and the

whistling of passing railway trains. Finally, no man or woman of sensitive feelings should ever attempt to address a Chautauqua audience, which has less regard for etiquette than any other in the world. Rare, indeed, is the occasion when a few persons do not leave during the discourse, and the old saying that the test of the success of a lecture is "whether more of the audience remain than go home" may almost be applied to the Chautauqua in all seriousness. Children circulate freely through the audience while the "show" is going on, whispering loudly to each other or to their parents, and often taking liberties with the speaker. Once when I was standing very close to the footlights, a small boy, who had become fascinated with my white shoes, reached over the lights and untied a shoe lace. Babies become hungry and vociferous, and must be taken out of the tent to be quieted and fed. In fact, there is a general atmosphere of movement in the audience. On one occasion when I was speaking one of two young girls returning to the tent was heard to say to the other, "I wonder if it's any more interesting now than when we went out." No, the Chautauqua platform is not a place for a sensitive person.

I trust that by this time all my

readers are aware that Chautauqua is not the name of a patent medicine or of a breakfast food, as one old lady I have heard of thought it was. "Chautauqua," originally the name of an Indian tribe, was borrowed for a lake in western New York the banks of which became the location of an annual summer gathering for entertainment and instruction. This was the first Chautauqua, a permanent, fixed institution. Later, the traveling Chautauqua, as we know it to-day, was developed. This is simply an arrangement for giving a series of towns in succession a programme of combined entertainment and education. Chautauqua is merely the lyceum in the light, pongee costume of summer.

"

Millbury, Massachusetts, has the honor of being the site of the first American lyceum, which was founded there in 1826, by Josiah Holbrook, of Derby, Connecticut. The movement grew so rapidly that by 1834 there were nearly three thousand lyceums in the United States. Mr. Holbrook borrowed the word lyceum from the spot where Aristotle used to lecture to the young men of Greece. Ralph Waldo Emerson is generally credited with being the first professional American lyceum lecturer, and nearly all of Emerson's famous essays were first written as lectures. Fees were small in those days. It is on record that when the town of Waltham offered Emerson five dollars for a lecture the great philosopher accepted only after stipulating that there must be thrown in "four quarts of oats for my horse."

Emerson later attained twenty dollars as a regular fee, which was five dollars more than most other lecturers were content with. Fees grew like everything else in the movement, however, and it was not long before Starr King was able to answer an inquiry with the statement that he lectured for "F. A. M. E.

-Fifty and my expenses." To-day the highest-priced speakers in lyceum work get for a single lecture fifteen times that fee of Starr King's and more than thirty-five times the price generally paid Emerson. Henry D. Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Wendell Phillips are a few of the intellectual giants whose work lent distinction to the programmes of the early lyceums.

The Chautauqua, then, is a summer lyceum, held under a canvas tent instead of in a hall of wood or stone. Some of the features of the organization of Chautauqua are peculiar to it alone, however. There are three, four, five, six, and seven day Chautauqua circuits. For example, take the simplest case, a three-day circuit. Suppose the first three towns are Green Meadows, Carp River, and Alfalfa Center. Very likely the population of no one of them exceeds five hundred souls. It is now June, and these towns have been "booked" for the circuit the preceding fall or winter. The "advance man" has visited them and thoroughly advertised the attractions which are to come. Now arrive two "crew boys." Their job is to erect the tent, the stage, and the

SCENE FROM BENJAMIN CHAPIN'S DRAMA "LINCOLN AT THE WHITE HOUSE" Chapin, who died two years ago, was a familiar figure at Chautauqua benches of unfinished boards for the audience. On the morning of the first of the three days the children of Green Meadows come to the tent for a "hike" and picnic under the supervision of a young woman termed the "Junior Supervisor." (Nearly every good Chautauqua circuit now has attractions planned for the entertainment and instruction of children alone.) In the afternoon the attraction consists of a band of Tyrolean yodlers (some of the yodlers may have been born in Milwaukee or Terre Haute or Harper's Landing, but generally a fair percentage are really im

WILLIAM J. BRYAN

Probably the best-known lecturer of Chautauqua "talent"

ported from the Tyrol). In the evening the yodlers again entertain for half an hour, being followed by the pièce de résistance of the day, a lecture by Mrs. Z. B. Wuggins entitled "America First, Last, and All the Time."

The second day Green Meadows enjoys outdoor games and sports for the children in the morning, and an Italian vocal and instrumental musical troupe in the afternoon, followed by a lecture "Community Engineering" by a young college professor whose ideas for improving the village school, the village church, and the village business life are distinctly worth hearing. In the evening there is a grand concert by the Italians.

on

The third day begins with a costume party for the children, prizes being given for the best costumes. After dinner-which of course is a noonday meal in Green Meadows-every one who can get away from farm or store goes to the big tent to hear the singing and the jokes of the Lightfoot Male Quartette. Green Meadows goes home to face three hundred and sixty-two days of normal humdrum existence, after an evening divided between these Lightfoot boys and the Hon. J. I. B. Mower, of the Louisiana State Legislature, whose lecture on "Post-War Duties of the United States to Europe" is heard with a surprising amount of attention and real understanding.

All performers on a Chautauqua platform, whether they be yodlers, cartoonists, or lecturers, are described by the generic term "talent." Well, in the case of our three-day circuit the talent which I was in Green Meadows on Monday will be opening the three-day programme at Alfalfa Center on Wednesday, while the talent which closes in Green Meadows on Wednesday does not reach Alfalfa Center until Saturday. As the three-day programme is finished in each village the tent is taken down by the "crew boys" and shipped to the next town allotted to them.

During the past season nearly nine thousand towns and nearly ten million persons were reached by Chautauqua in this country and Canada alone. It was with good reason that Theodore Roosevelt called Chautauqua "the most American thing in America." It is as fundamentally American as Indian corn or jazz. American promoters have already carried it to several other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, however. England, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are all now reached by one large American Chautauqua Association, which sends American talent to these British coun. tries and imports British talent in return. The interchange of ideas thus brought about is making Chautauqua one of the strongest forces now working for the unity of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Mr. Louis J. Alber, President of the Affiliated Lyceum and Chautauqua Association, to whom I am indebted for not a little of the information in this article, well says that, "not only is Chautauqua 'the most American thing in America,' but it is the most democratic thing in democracy." Chautau

qua is the poor man's university. Its value is enhanced by the fact that its particular field is largely among the more remote and smaller communities of the country. In many cases it is the only link between them and culture. Of course a large portion of any Chautauqua programme is pure entertainment. But entertainment in this case is more than it is in a big city; in a little struggling farm village or a harddriven mining town entertainment means in the best sense recreation and mental rejuvenation.

"We look forward to Chautauqua the whole year as the bright spot in our lives," said a little old farmer's wife to me last summer in South Dakota. "Our year is made up of fifty-one weeks of humdrum slavery and one week of Chautauqua."

However, if you look at any Chautau qua programme, you will be surprised at the large percentage of features in which instruction or pure information is more emphasized than entertainment. Lectures, for instance, form a very large part of any Chautauqua programme. Now a great many of these lectures are still built after a modified form of the

old recipe-that is, you may say that instead of being five parts sense and five parts nonsense, they are seven parts stimulation of the mind and three parts stimulation of the diaphragm.

It was as one of the large number of men and women who every summer "put the talk in Chautauqua” that I had my first experience with "the most American thing in America" several years ago. Like every other lecturer at his first Chautauqua experience, I was surprised by the thirst for information on serious subjects and the great capacity for absorbing it which I found among people who had never had more than a common school education, who had never had opportunities to use any of the usual means of higher cultivation. My first town was a little dusty farm village of 371 inhabitants, or about a third the size of the audience that the big tent would hold. "Why on earth do they have a Chautauqua in this town?" I asked myself. The answer was soon visible--a press of more than a. hundred automobiles, mostly Fords, which poured into town from all directions, each bringing a farmer and his family. When a lecturer sees people

like these making such an effort as this to hear him expound his plan for rehabilitating Mexico, or for achieving a real League of Nations, or for improving American public school education, that lecturer is put on his mettle as he has probably never been put on his mettle before. The sight of this tremendous thirst for information ought to make the most egregious expounder of claptrap and buncombe expurgate such features from his talk.

Chautauqua is doing a great work of education and inspiration. It reaches minds that no other school reaches, and it reaches hearts that no other church reaches. Religion without creed is one of the fundamental principles of Chautauqua. When you hear this or that clergyman of this or that narrow sect complaining that because people do not fill his church religion is dying in the hearts of Americans, tell him that, while his premises may be right, he had better revise his deductions. The truth is that millions of the sort of people who used to attend churches where religion with creed was extolled are now getting their religion without creed from Chautauqua.

"I'm blamed if he didn't run every train on the division without the slightest authority."

"And did he do it all right?" "Oh, yes, all right."

The speakers were Thomas A. Scott, in charge of one of the divisions of the Pennsylvania Railroad System, and the head of the freighting department of Pittsburgh. The time was before the Civil War period. The "little whitehaired Scotch devil" was Andrew Carnegie.

He was working for Scott at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month as clerk and telegraph operator. One morning young Carnegie learned that a serious accident had delayed the express passenger train westward and that the passenger train eastward was proceeding with a flagman in advance at every curve. The freight trains were all standing still upon the sidings. Mr. Scott was not to be found. Mr. Carnegie says, in his delightful autobiography: "I could not resist the temptation to plunge in, take the responsibility, give train orders, and set matters going." He continues:

"Death or Westminster Abbey," flashed across my mind. I knew it was dismissal, disgrace, perhaps criminal punishment for me if I erred. On the other hand, I could bring in the wearied freight-train men who had lain out all night. I could set everything in motion. I knew I could. I had often done it in wiring Mr. Scott's orders. I knew just what to do, and so I began. I gave the orders in his name, started every train, sat at the instrument watching every tick, carried the trains along from station to station,

1 Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

$5.

took extra precaution, and had everything running smoothly when Mr. Scott at last reached the office.

That was the kind of Scotch fiber Andrew Carnegie showed. He was willing to take responsibility and "to take a chance," just as the Bruce did, whose tomb is in Carnegie's native town of Dunfermline, and where Dunfermline boys grew up with true Scotch imagination and pride. When, one day, a wicked

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company

Faden Camegie

big boy at school told Andrew that England was far larger than Scotland, Andrew went to his uncle, who had the remedy. "Not at all, Naig [his diminutive for Carnegie]. If Scotland were rolled out flat as England, Scotland would be the larger. But would you have the Highlands rolled down?"

Another reason why Andrew Carnegie succeeded in life was because he knew

men. He tells us of this trait in connection with his keeping pigeons and rabbits as a boy. He says:

I am grateful every time I think of the trouble my father took to build a suitable house for these pets.

Our home became headquarters for my young companions. . . . My first business venture was securing my companions' services for a season as an employer, the compensation being that the young rabbits, when such came, should be named after them. The Saturday holiday was generally spent by my flock in gathering food for the rabbits. My conscience reproves me to-day, looking back, when I think of the hard bargain I drove with my young playmates, many of whom were content to gather dandelions and clover for a whole season with me, conditioned upon this unique reward-the poorest return ever made for labor. Alas! what else had I to offer them? Not a penny.

I treasure the remembrance of this plan as the earliest evidence of organizing power upon the development of which my material success in life has hung-a success not to be attributed to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than myself.

Andrew Carnegie began work as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week. He then served the Pennsylvania Railroad System from telegraph boy and operator to the management of the Pittsburgh division. He became assistant to Mr. Scott when Scott was Assistant Secretary of War in charge of transportation. He organized rail-making, bridge-making, and locomotive concerns. He introduced the Bessemer process in the manufacture of steel. He draws this picture of himself:

Up to this time [1873] I had the reputation in business of being a bold, fearless, and perhaps a somewhat reckless young man. . . . I know of one who declared that if "Andrew Carnegie's brains did not carry through, his luck would." But I am sure that any competent judge

...

would be surprised to find how little I ever risked for myself or my partners.... My supply of Scotch caution has never been small; but I was apparently something of a daredevil now and then to the manufacturing fathers of Pittsburgh. They were old and I was young, which made all the difference.

The one occurrence in Mr. Carnegie's Pittsburgh career which wounded him deeply was the Homestead strike (1892). Workmen had been killed at the Carnegie Works. That was sufficient, says Mr. Carnegie, "to make my name a by word for years." While he was in Scotland the strike arose; "it was so unnecessary," says Mr. Carnegie. Finally, satisfaction came-and largely through the National Civic Federation, which, as Mr. Carnegie records, exerts "a benign influence over both employers and employees."

The iron and steel master, now rich, proceeded to spend his money on the principle that "private wealth is a public trust." His first benefaction took the form of public library buildings. The thought of devoting his money to this purpose was suggested by his early acquaintance with Colonel Anderson, of Pittsburgh, who, on Saturday afternoons, had the praiseworthy habit of lending any of his several hundred

books. Young Andrew eagerly looked forward to these afternoons, and resolved that if he ever became rich he would found libraries. He did. And then came the Pittsburgh Carnegie Institute; the Carnegie Institution, with its seat at Washington; the Hero Fund; the Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; the Endowment for International Peace; and, finally, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was to act as a trustee for all future gifts.

Whether a poor boy or a millionaire, Andrew Carnegie remained throughout the shrewd, keen, wide-awake Scotch character. He retained his childlike and youthfully buoyant enthusiasms to the last. No matter how much people may criticise his personal idiosyncrasies and his political and social theories, he was a great captain of industry and he had a great conception of life. His Autobiography is indeed a human document. Happily, its editor has set it before us almost entirely in Mr. Carnegie's own words. The Scotch laddie who was to become one of the most notable Americans of his time tells his tale in his own way. The book is thus firsthand, intimate, individual. It will be read and appreciated the world over.

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