One going as a lecturer to the most remote parts of the country that support a lecture course may think he will be a treat, but if he has any sensibility he will soon discover that, far from that, he usually has a critical audience. It is interested in what he has to say, treats him with courtesy and respect; but it has also had experience with scores of lecturers in past years and compares his matter and his manner with theirs. I have been in towns in the Middle West where they had heard Thackeray and Dickens read, had listened to Emerson and Bronson Alcott, and had heard every popular lecturer in all the years since their day. Your real opportunity to judge of the intelligence and alertness of the community comes while you are speaking. Look for an hour or more into the faces of a group of men and women who, whatever they may think of you, are courteous enough to give you their attention, and you know soon what certain individuals think of what you are saying. Always I found myself speaking to someone who I knew heartily disagreed with me, someone I felt I would like to convince. Always I knew that there was a man waiting to challenge me. Usually these challenges came from Socialists or Single Taxers. If an opportunity was given to ask questions after my talk (something which I always encouraged), they were the first on their feet. The community knew them and knew what their questions would be, and frequently laughed at them. But a really good audience enjoys seeing a speaker heckled a bit and the speaker, if he is really interested in his business, is glad to take the heckling. I know nothing better for a lecturer who is going over the same arguments night after night than to know that there will probably be somebody in his audience who will seize the first opportunity to pick on a weak point, challenge his generalization, his facts. If that happens you always go away from your lecture better equipped than you came to it. In the twelve years in which I regularly made an annual lecture trip—I gave up the work in 1932, finding it too much for my strength—in all those twelve years I everywhere found the liveliest absorption in national policies. People told you how they felt about an undertaking, how it was working out in their particular community—important, for here you had the test of the pudding in its eating. It was what I saw of the workings of prohibition in the 1920’s that drove me to do one of the most unpopular things I ever did—that was to tell bluntly how I saw it working in hotels from one end of the land to the other, disheartening evidences of its effect on the young, the unexpected dangers it brought to a woman traveling alone at night, both in stations and on trains. I set down what I had seen over a wide range of territory, what I had heard from the mouths of men and women who had been ardent prohibitionists, and who were appalled by the things that were happening particularly to youth in their own communities.