FIFTY YEARS ON THE LECTURE
PLATFORM
BY
RUSSELL H. CONWELL
AN Autobiography! What an absurd request!
If all the conditions were favorable, the story of my public Life could not be made interesting.
It does not seem possible that any will care to read so plain and uneventful a tale. I see nothing in it for boasting, nor much that could be helpful.
Then I never saved a scrap of paper intentionally concerning my work to which I could refer, not a book, not a sermon, not a lecture, not a newspaper notice or account, not a magazine article, not one of the kind biographies written from time to time by noble friends have I ever kept even as a souvenir, although some of them may be in my library. I have ever felt that the writers concerning my life were too generous and that my own work was too hastily done. Hence I have nothing upon which to base an autobiographical account, except the recollections which come to an overburdened mind.
My general view of half a century on the lecture platform brings to me precious and beautiful memories, and fills my soul with devout gratitude for the blessings and kindnesses which have been given to me so far beyond my deserts.
So much more success has come to my hands than I ever expected; so much more of good have I found than even youth's wildest dream included; so much more effective have been my weakest endeavors than I ever planned or hoped--that a biography written truthfully would be mostly an account of what men and women have done for me.
I have lived to see accomplished far more than my highest ambition included, and have seen the enterprises I have undertaken rush by me, pushed on by a thousand strong hands until they have left me far behind them. The realities are like dreams to me. Blessings on the loving hearts and noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice for others' good and to think only of what they could do, and never of what they should get!
Many of them have ascended into the Shining Land, and here I am in mine age gazing up alone,_Only waiting till the shadows Are a little longer grown_.
Fifty years! I was a young man, not yet of age, when I delivered my first platform lecture.
The Civil War of 1861-65 drew on with all its passions, patriotism, horrors, and fears, and I was studying law at Yale University. I had from childhood felt that I was ``called to the ministry.''
The earliest event of memory is the prayer of my father at family prayers in the little old cottage in the Hampshire highlands of the Berkshire Hills, calling on God with a sobbing voice to lead me into some special service for the Saviour. It filled me with awe, dread, and fear, and I recoiled from the thought, until I determined to fight against it with all my power. So I sought for other professions and for decent excuses for being anything but a preacher.
Yet while I was nervous and timid before the class in declamation and dreaded to face any kind of an audience, I felt in my soul a strange impulsion toward public speaking which for years made me miserable. The war and the public meetings for recruiting soldiers furnished an outlet for my suppressed sense of duty, and my first lecture was on the ``Lessons of History'' as applied to the campaigns against the Confederacy.
That matchless temperance orator and loving friend, John B. Gough, introduced me to the little audience in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1862.
What a foolish little school-boy speech it must have been! But Mr. Gough's kind words of praise, the bouquets and the applause, made me feel that somehow the way to public oratory would not be so hard as I had feared.
From that time I acted on Mr. Gough's advice and ``sought practice'' by accepting almost every invitation I received to speak on any kind of a subject. There were many sad failures and tears, but it was a restful compromise with my conscience concerning the ministry, and it pleased my friends.
I addressed picnics, Sunday-schools, patriotic meetings, funerals, anniversaries, commencements, debates, cattle-shows, and sewing-circles without partiality and without price. For the first five years the income was all experience. Then voluntary gifts began to come occasionally in the shape of a jack-knife, a ham, a book, and the first cash remuneration was from a farmers' club, of seventy-five cents toward the ``horse hire.''
It was a curious fact that one member of that club afterward moved to Salt Lake City and was a member of the committee at the Mormon Tabernacle in 1872 which, when I was a correspondent, on a journey around the world, employed me to lecture on ``Men of the Mountains'' in the Mormon Tabernacle, at a fee of five hundred dollars.
While I was gaining practice in the first years of platform work, I had the good fortune to have profitable employment as a soldier, or as a correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor or as a preacher, which enabled me to pay my own expenses, and it has been seldom in the fifty years that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use.
In the last thirty-six years I have dedicated solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an autobiography, perhaps I may be aged enough to avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when Istate that some years I delivered one lecture, ``Acres of Diamonds,'' over two hundred times each year, at an average income of about one hundred and fifty dollars for each lecture.
It was a remarkable good fortune which came to me as a lecturer when Mr. James Redpath organized the first lecture bureau ever established.
Mr. Redpath was the biographer of John Brown of Harper's Ferry renown, and as Mr. Brown had been long a friend of my father's I found employment, while a student on vacation, in selling that life of John Brown. That acquaintance with Mr.
