PUBLIC MEETINGS.
IF there is one thing which the average Englishman—i.e., the plain man or ordinary man, that useful figment on whom journalists and orators are accustomed to father their wisest thoughts—loves more than another, it is a public meeting. It is there, if anywhere, that he gets a chance of filling himself with those windy platitudes and rhetorical commonplaces in which his soul delights. Dr. Johnson once said that he doubted if any man ever had enough wall-fruit. Probably the average man in his heart feels this about the truisms and commonplaces of politics and life, but at any rate a public meeting gives him the beat chance procurable for satisfying his morbid appetite for hearing the things which no one doubts, and yet which every one feels encouraged by hearing enumerated with emphasis and conviction. This being the case, all that concerns the holding and management of public meetings must be of interest and delight to the true- born Briton. Hence we need make no apology, even in the holiday season, for drawing attention to a little book, entitled "The Conduct of Public Meetings," by Mr. J. Hunt Cooke, just published by Messrs. Alexander and Shepheard, of Fnrnival Street. Indeed, we are not sure that the subject is not peculiarly appropriate to the holiday season. A hundred circumstances of travel by flood and field may give occasion for the holding of a public meeting. Only the other day the wreck of a Channel steamer gave rise to such a gathering. No sooner had the passengers of the `Seaford' gathered on the deck of the Lyon,' than the need for holding a public meeting arose in the minds of the men who had just been saved from a watery grave. They watched the relentless deep close over the head of the Newhaven and Dieppe packet, and then, each buttoning tighter his cork jacket or life-belt, they proceeded to listen to an address from a gentleman in gold spectacles, who had obligingly taken the chair on the halyards or the jib-boom, or whatever is the nautical equivalent of the chair. The address over, they passed a resolution expressing their gratitude to the captain of the steamer which did not sink, and another to the captain of the steamer which did, and presumably ended by a vote of thanks to the chairman " for so kindly being present, and for presiding over our proceedings with so much tact and courtesy." No doubt it is rare to get a public meeting in the Channel passage, but longer voyages present a good many opportunities for such gatherings. There is the election of the entertainment committee, and then there may be a special meeting to consider the conduct of the committee in excluding or including, as the case may be, an obstacle race from or in the sports, or in allowing or disallowing the singing of "The Wearing of the Green" in the Wednesday evening concerts. Even a Swiss or Tyrolean pension or hotel may pro- vide a public meeting either to protest against veal being provided three times a day, or to request the manager to allow the use of the smoking-room for choir practice on Sunday afternoons. In truth, the public meeting is always with the Englishman, and hence it is very important that he should have guidance as to the proper way in which to manage it. The humblest of us may suddenly find himself acting as a chairman, or else seeing that idiot Jones called to preside over the proceedings. In the first case we want to know how we ought to manage things. In the other, we want to put Jones right, and show by implication that things would have gone much more pleasantly and smoothly if we had only had the direction of affairs.
On the present occasion we shall not attempt any compre- hensive view of the subject of public meetings,—we leave that to Mr. Cooke. All we shall do is to offer one or two running comments on the points with which he deals. Mr. Cooke tells us, to begin with, that these are the fundamentals in regard to the conduct of public meetings :—" First, there should be one clearly defined subject, and only one, under discussion. Secondly, every one entitled to vote has a
right once, and only once, to address the meeting on the subject. Thirdly, the chairman is the meeting per- sonified. These are the factors of a fair debate. Upon them are based the laws which provide liberty of speech." No doubt this is the ideal; but can any of our readers put his hand on his heart and honestly say that he was ever present at a public meeting where there was only one clearly defined subject under discussion P If he can, we can only say, as Voltaire said when he came in the manuscript play to the stage direction, "Ici le chevalier rit,"—" Le chevalier eat plus heureux que moi." We never yet met a public meeting at which only one clear point was ender discussion. Why, the chairman in his " few introductory remarks " usually intro- duces at least a dozen totally irrelevant points; and as for the seconders of the resolutions, why, they "survey mankind from China to Peru," even if the nominal subject is the founding of a lawn-tennis club. The remark that the chair- man is the meeting personified is, again, a very alarming one. Just think of the feelings of the ordinary Member of Parliament who reads this and then remembers that only last week he presided at a meeting of licensed victuallers. Is he really to consider that even for one brief hour he was "the trade" personified. What would his wife say, who already considers that he is not so slim as when they married? Still more, what would be said by his uncle the Bishop, who is a teetotaler, and anything but pleased with his line on the temperance question ? Assuredly, this per- sonification is too much to ask of one's chairman. Mr. Cooke has, of course, a great deal to say about how the chairman should comport himself, and how he may best get throzgli the business in hand. We confess, however, that our ideal chairman is not to be found in the text, but in the account which he gives in a note of the way in which a chairman ought not to behave. His awful warning is the chairman for our money. Here is his account of what a chairman should not do, and of what we hold a chairman ought to do :—" When the rules and precedents of English chairmanship can be so easily learned, it is painful to have such a case as the follow. ing. At a certain meeting, a local magnate, one well re- spected and beloved, was asked to preside. On being placed in the chair he asked what he was to do. He was told to open the meeting. He rose and said, `Open the meeting,' " and sat down. The secretary, fortunately, was equal to the duty, so he simply did the chairman's work himself, whilst the great man sat still, the picture of dignified incompetency. He uttered never a word until a vote of ' thanks for his able chairmanship' had been passed, when he rose and said, ' Gentlemen, I thank you for the way you have drunk my health — I mean — Oh, never mind, it's all right ! ' and then followed the secretary off the platform." Here was an ideal chairman. He wasted no time in twaddly preliminary remarks ; he did not tell the meeting at inor- dinate length how well he remembered addressing a similar gathering some twenty years ago ; he did not make ghastly little jokes about his being one of the old boys now ; he did not talk about old women at the back of the hall as " members of the fair sex," or call the reporters "recording angels," he did not set people's teeth on edge by facetious refer- ences to what his wife said as " we were driving here." In a word, he did not make people sit with clenched fists think- ing of the lines in which a great poet has described the application of the closure to an orator who went on
speaking,—
"Until with a hammer
They silenced his clamour."
No, this admirable chairman invented a perfectly adequate formula for getting to business. " Open the meeting !" It is magnificent. It is like the orders on board a steamer, " Full steam ahead! " and "Back her,—stop her !" or any other of those exciting and laconic utterances which one hears shouted down the tube,—speeches truly sublime in their simplicity and concentration.
We have quoted from Mr. Cooke's notes, and may mention in this connection that they contain some of the best things in his little book. There is a charming account of how a local infidel appeared at " a Bible Society in a small town," and how the chairman put down the local infidel in the wrong way, and so discredited the Society. Another note describes how, in a certain provincial town, "there used to reside a man who accepted presents from one political party in the place to mar the meetings of the other party." "Accepted presents" is good. Generally the other political party call them " ruffians hired to prevent the electors of Little Peddlington from hearing the truth." However, there can be no question as to the difficulties presented by the gentleman who accepts presents to mar meetings by undue garrulity. The chairman can meet with no more awful wild- fowl than this. Here is Mr. Cooke's account of one of these persons He bad imperturbable impudence, rather liked to be hissed, and could talk on for any length of time. For example, at the time of a School Board election he attended one of the meetings with a small party of his friends, who would shout for fair-play.' He went on for more than three- quarters of an hour, giving a dissertation upon the first chapter of Genesis and geology. When the chairman tried to stop him, his friends shouted, Let him be heard! ' When it was pointed out he was irrelevant, be said he would show bow it bore upon the subject if they would give him time. Interruptions he enjoyed, and stood calm till they subsided. His aim was to exhaust the meeting as far as possible before the candidate could be heard. In not stopping him the chair- man was wrong. He ought to have disregarded all cries about fair-play, and taken a vote as to whether the audience wished to hear the speaker farther. He would have found they did not ; and then might have allowed him three minutes to conclude, after which he should have been heard no more ; but if he persisted, been treated as a disorderly person." Before we leave Mr. Cooke's book, we must say a word as to his advice to people who take the chair at a lecture. "One serious mistake," he tells us, "is often committed. The chairman at a lecture ought to be careful not to occupy time with introductory remarks ; the people gather to bear the lecture. Especially should the chairman avoid making any observations on the subject of the lecture. He is not supposed to know what view the lecturer may take, and may look rather foolish by having advanced a contrary opinion." That is very sound advice. Who does not remember lecturing " a Sunday- school and friends " on Egypt, and having his great passage about the smile on the lips of the Sphinx spiked by the chair- man with a hacked and stammered quotation from "Eothen." Mr. Cooke gives us, indeed, in his notes two awful warnings of such unchairmanlike poaching :—" A lecture was about to be delivered on ' Apparitions.' The chairman, in a rambling opening speech, stated his view, which was directly contra- dictory to that of the lecturer, and further asserted that those who did not hold the opinion he did were guilty of great folly. But he looked very foolish as the lecture went on to find his confident utterances disproved and ridiculed to the no small amusement of the audience." The other example is equally tragic. "Dr. Stanford was on one occasion about to deliver a lecture upon Dr. Doddridge. The chairman made a long, introductory speech, in the course of which he narrated a number of incidents in the life of the great theologian, so weakening the lecture by forestalling some of the finest parts. The annoyance was very great both to the lecturer and his audience, who sympathised with him in the unfair treatment he had received." One is glad the audience took it that way. It showed a really kindly feeling in them not to enjoy the accounts of how Dr. Doddridge's legs swelled to three times their normal size just before he died, or how he robbed an orchard in his earliest youth, or pre- vented a, neighbour's son from torturing a cat, because these pieces of "fat," as the actors say, belonged of right to the lecturer, and not to the chairman. We fear that most audiences are not nearly so sympathetic; and carelessly, and often no doubt cruelly, take a laugh or enjoy a passage of interest wherever they can get it. If the chairman tells them how the missionary was baked and eaten, they thrill then and there, and do not generously hold themselves back for the lecturer's " It may surprise and perhaps interest you to learn that the humble individual who now addresses you has taken by the hand the savage chief, MacWagga, who had a principal share in the dreadful banquet, to which I will not further allude, except to say that the position he occupied on that festal occasion—festal to him, but infinitely sad to us—was not unlike that of the vice-chair at our public dinners. Mac- Wagga is, however, now converted. It may be a fancy, but I like to think that even in his death the influence of our friend and brother was not unfelt ; " and so on and so on. No doubt that is still rather a thrilling announcement ; but how much
less thrilling if the chairman has already alluded to all the
chief circumstances. In truth, we come back to our original point. The best chairman is he who, when he opens the proceedings, says nothing ; and when the speaking is over, and he has received his thanks, gets up and says " Thank you ; good-night !" " The man who talks least," that is the answer to tho poet's question,— "Who is the happy chairman, who is he That all who take the chair should wish to be."
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