Then Attorney Butler spoke up, and wanted to know if I had threatened that if I were not permitted the use of a university building I would attack President Birge and the university in some other hall. To this I said that my action followed automatically from the situation. I had come to Madison for the purpose of delivering to the students an address entitled: “The College Student and the Modern Crisis.” If the university would permit me to deliver this address, I should deliver it. If they wouldn’t permit me to deliver this address, I should naturally have to discuss the question of why they took such action. Mr. Butler’s answer was that nobody should come to the university, with his consent, and try to bulldoze the board of regents by any kind of threat. The board offered me an additional five minutes, if I wished it, but I answered that the greatest virtue in an orator was to know when he had said his say. I thanked them and retired; and that afternoon they held another session, and Mr. Butler and Dr. Seaman, ably seconded by the bathtub manufacturer and the wholesale grocer, voted that I should be refused the use of the gymnasium. The seven other members of the board voted that President Birge should be requested to grant me the use of the gymnasium. President Birge himself did not vote, and I am sorry to state that the malted milk regent was absent and did not get recorded. Needless to say, all this publicity—it filled many columns of Madison’s two newspapers for five days—resulted in the gymnasium’s being packed on Wednesday evening. Some two thousand students heard my scheduled address, and asked me questions for an hour afterwards, and the walls of the building did not collapse, nor have any of the students since thrown any bombs. Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and played each of its members in turn, and beat them in straight sets; and I am told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and don’t know his name; but he assured me, with deep conviction, that I had made a grave blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough to hold the crowd! CHAPTER XLVIII THE PRICE OF LIBERTY