Of course such a thing could not happen in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach.

Much of my early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust.

At Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were, therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated" class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but politically they were far better educated than their social superiors, and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship.

How well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway.

Such was the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones.