In my efforts on the public platform I never have been able to understand why people come to hear me speak.  This question I never can rid myself of.  Time and time again, as I have stood in the street in front of a building and have seen men and women passing in large numbers into the audience room where I was to speak, I have felt ashamed that I should be the cause of people—­as it seemed to me—­wasting a valuable hour of their time.  Some years ago I was to deliver an address before a literary society in Madison, Wis.  An hour before the time set for me to speak, a fierce snow-storm began, and continued for several hours.  I made up my mind that there would be no audience, and that I should not have to speak, but, as a matter of duty, I went to the church, and found it packed with people.  The surprise gave me a shock that I did not recover from during the whole evening.

People often ask me if I feel nervous before speaking, or else they suggest that, since I speak often, they suppose that I get used to it.  In answer to this question I have to say that I always suffer intensely from nervousness before speaking.  More than once, just before I was to make an important address, this nervous strain has been so great that I have resolved never again to speak in public.  I not only feel nervous before speaking, but after I have finished I usually feel a sense of regret, because it seems to me as if I had left out of my address the main thing and the best thing that I had meant to say.

There is a great compensation, though, for this preliminary nervous suffering, that comes to me after I have been speaking for about ten minutes, and have come to feel that I have really mastered my audience, and that we have gotten into full and complete sympathy with each other.  It seems to me that there is rarely such a combination of mental and physical delight in any effort as that which comes to a public speaker when he feels that he has a great audience completely within his control.  There is a thread of sympathy and oneness that connects a public speaker with his audience, that is just as strong as though it was something tangible and visible.  If in an audience of a thousand people there is one person who is not in sympathy with my views, or is inclined to be doubtful, cold, or critical, I can pick him out.  When I have found him I usually go straight at him, and it is a great satisfaction to watch the process of his thawing out.  I find that the most effective medicine for such individuals is administered at first in the form of a story, although I never tell an anecdote simply for the sake of telling one.  That kind of thing, I think, is empty and hollow, and an audience soon finds it out.