Crowded and interesting as my life had been hitherto, the best was yet to be.  My realization of Browning’s beautiful line from “Rabbi Ben Ezra”—­“The last of life, for which the first was made,” came when I saw opening before me possibilities for public service undreamed of in my earlier years.  For the advancement of effective voting I had so far confined my efforts to the newspapers.  My brother John had suggested the change of name from proportional representation to effective voting as one more likely to catch the popular ear, and I had proposed a modification of Hare’s original plan of having one huge electorate, and suggested instead the adoption of six-member districts.  The State as one electorate returning 42 members for the Assembly may be magnificent, and may also be the pure essence of democracy, but it is neither commonsense nor practicable.  “Why not take effective voting to the people?” was suggested to me.  No sooner said than done.  I had ballot papers prepared and leaflets printed, and I began the public campaign which has gone on ever since.  During a visit to Melbourne as a member of a charities conference it was first discovered that I had some of the gifts of a public speaker.  My friend, the Rev. Charles Strong, had invited me to lecture before his working men’s club at Collingwood, and I chose as my subject “Effective Voting.”

When on my return Mr. Barr Smith, who had long grasped the principle of justice underlying effective voting, and was eager for its adoption, offered to finance a lecturing tour through the State, I jumped at the offer.  There was the opportunity for which I had been waiting for years.  I got up at unearthly hours to catch trains, and sometimes succeeded only through the timely lifts of kindly drivers.  Once I went in a carrier’s van, because I had missed the early morning cars.  I travelled thousands of miles in all weathers to carry to the people the gospel of electoral reform.  Disappointments were frequent, and sometimes disheartening; but the silver lining of every cloud turned up somewhere, and I look back on that first lecturing tour as a time of the sowing of good seed, the harvest of which is now beginning to ripen.  I had no advance agents to announce my arrival, and at one town in the north I found nobody at the station to meet me.  I spent the most miserable two and a half hours of my life waiting Micawber-like for something to turn up; and it turned up in the person of the village blacksmith.  I spoke to him, and explained my mission to the town.  He had heard nothing of any meeting.  Incidentally I discovered that my correspondent was in Adelaide, and had evidently forgotten all about my coming.  “Well,” I said to the blacksmith, “if you can get together a dozen intelligent men I will explain effective voting to them.”  He looked at me with a dumbfounded air, and then burst out, “Good G—­, madam, there are not three intelligent men in the town.”  But the old order has changed, and in 1909 Mrs. Young addressed an enthusiastic