comic strips). Riverside Drive apartmenteers take the Times, and the evening World, and a Hearst paper. Chicago Goldcoasters need both the Tribune and the News and something else rather different. A speaker must know the last word on his subject.

The private library for speech purposes should include the best of current literature. There are no better guides for book purchasers than The Saturday Review of Literature, and the New York Herald-Tribune section: Books. In almost every good new book published there is something which will delight and interest you, and contribute toward your next public address. If you keep your eyes open you will find what you are looking for. A helpful and apt quotation or illustration from the literary sensation of the season helps to make your speech properly sensational. The private library should also be stocked with the best of current magazines.

If the speaker who is a reader cannot afford subscriptions to magazines he can find them in the better public libraries. Sometimes we find small town libraries that are surprisingly good, better stocked for intelligent reading than some metropolitan libraries. A few magazines which should prove helpful to almost any college speaker are: The Independent, Time, Current Opinion, Current History, The Scientific American, The Living Age, the New Republic . . . There are not more than two American newspapers of the calibre of The Manchester Guardian. With a classical background, an acquaintance with the best modern books, and an hour every day for three or four years with periodicals mentioned in this paragraph, a prospective speaker should have something worth listening to.

Project. Spend an hour or two reading a good daily newspaper. Read thoroughly every first page story. Give a talk on the news of the day and explain your reasons why

you think certain news "made" the first page.

Your lan

guage can be somewhat colloquial and breezy for this event. However, be grammatical and dignified. Tell what happened with enough animation so that the audience. may visualize each incident.

2. Waste Not This Hour.

Since a college graduate often tries several positions before he finds himself and his life work, he should take every opportunity, at least while he is in college, to broaden and deepen his culture and to investigate vocations. He should read every new outline of phases of the experience of the race, even the "Outline of Art", and the "Outline of Music". He should take courses in the Fine Arts, Architecture, Music, Agriculture, Oriental and Slavic Literatures. He should attend every public lecture which he can on subjects not covered by his college courses. He should extend his personal contacts with specialists in ever so many fields of research and achievement. He should acquire a variety of experiences in and with campus and vacation recreations, occupations, and hobbies.

Any teacher of speech, certainly every debate coach, will bear witness and give testimony that he would rather work with a creatively intelligent, modestly sophisticated Junior who has never made a public speech than with a loquacious and shallow-minded Senior.

Project. This is worth trying, just for fun. It bolsters self-confidence and leads to something better. Some evening after you have eaten double portions of everything you like, attend a lecture on some metaphysical subject, such as The Demiurge In Relation To The Cosmology Of The Fertile Crescent. After you have been aroused from your slumbers, walk home through the night "spouting" a parody of the lecture. Then study up some subdivision of the subject and give a first class, exciting talk on it.

C. TOMORROW

1. We Are Not Merely Children Of The Past; We Are Parents Of The Future.

When reliable mental tests are developed, one prerequisite for admission to a class in public speaking should be an Intelligence Quotient of at least 125. If it were possible, a chairman of a program committee might then require such an examination of candidates for the rostrum of the society which he represents. A speaker who proves an I. Q. of 125 might be allowed 30 minutes of the club's time; an I. Q. of 150 might rate an hour; and an I. Q. of 180 an hour and a half. Of course, this is semi-facetious hypothesis; but it represents well enough the attitude of program organizers and of audiences at the conclusion of an address by a formerly unknown speaker. The mental anguish of a program chairman while a speech progresses from nowhere to nowhere, while the oratory waxes hot and vapid, and while it becomes more and more apparent that the talker has nothing to contribute which will make the future of his auditors brighter, that mental anguish is worse than the tortures of the damned could be.

It is not enough that the temporary possessor of a platform has shown himself to be adequate in particular situations where he happened to excel, that he has browsed in the pastures of yesterday and remembered what happened, he must also prove himself adequate to anticipate and probably successfully meet similar situations in the future. He must have not merely intelligence and knowledge; he must have creative imagination. He must make himself at one with the audience, that particular audience, and be of some assistance to it so that its members may improve the hours that are to come.

Each of us has listened open-mouthed to spell-binders who have all but paralyzed us with their smooth flow of

words; but when it was all over and we have ceased our applause and have nearly reached home, we have confessed, "Marvelous, wasn't it; but what was it all about?" A Canadian professor of pre-ancient history still confesses to his classes that the only proper justification for the study of the story of any racial experience is that through. an intelligent understanding of the past we can make ourselves able to avoid mistakes in the future, and to do better than did our forbears. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors so that our descendants may have a broader vista.

Project. Prepare carefully and deliver a five minutes talk on The Future of some subject with which you are familiar; for example, The Future of The Olympic Games, The Future of Parliamentary Government, The Future of Tabloid Newspapers, The Future of the Tutorial System in Universities, The Future of Secret Societies, The Future of Co-education . . . Before you have a right to address an audience, you must become thoroughly informed concerning the history of your subject, and you must know all possible angles of the present situation. You might make this a lecture illustrated by lantern slides, and use a half hour of your audience's time.

2. The One Indisputable Fact Is The Word, "Perhaps".

One of the popular and possibly justified criticisms of those who experiment with psychic phenomena is that they are unable consistently to predict future events; the turns of the Stock Market, whether an expected baby will be a boy or a girl, which nation is going to win the war . . It is remarkable, in the best sense, that the more reliable of the psychic researchers seldom indulge in prophecy. A public speaker may take no undue risks in predicting the future; but if he knows his business he must serve as a guide.

Part of the equipment for the development of knowledge are magazines of opinion; such as, The Outlook, The New Republic, The Nation, The World Tomorrow. A future speaker, now while he has time and opportunity during his undergraduate years, would do well to read all of the little dollar volumes of the Today and Tomorrow Series. They are written by experts; and they are not extravagant.

Project. Read all you can find from daily Associated Press and United Press reports this week about some situation of real importance to this Country or to the Civilized World. Compare the next comments of The Outlook and of The Nation on this situation. Form your own opinion and justify it through a short talk. Report only facts which are generally admitted. Give credit for the opinions and comments of editorial writers. Sift evidence, analyze, and if you wish, predict what will be accepted as the truth. Try not to be academic in your manner. Let your audience live through the situation with you. Suggested topics: Central America, Mexico, Soviet Russia, Oil Lands, The Red Menace In America, The Yellow Peril, Air Defense .

D. WORLD CITIZENSHIP

1.

The World Is My Parish . .

It would do us all good to read or re-read Thackeray's "Book of Snobs". It is an excellent corrective. So-called "self-made" men are seldom snobbish, except in their use of the term, "self-made". Few men who earn their own way through the regime of higher education are snobs. College men who are snobs are usually those who have the least right to be; their parents sacrifice security and comfort to give them extraordinary advantages, and the sons take it out on the world at large through a "holier than