It will be the same with those who desire to fill drunkards' graves. The
time is almost here when all positions of profit and trust will be
carefully and judiciously handed out, and those who do not fit themselves
for those positions will be left in the lurch, whatever that may be.

It is with this fact glaring me in the face that I have consented to
appear before you to-day and lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise
and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology and geology of evolution. It
is for this that I have poured over such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer,
Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius and Hoyle. It is for the
purpose of advancing the cause of common humanity and to jerk the rising
generation out of barbarism into the dazzling effulgence of clashing
intellects and fermenting brains that I have sought the works of
Pythagoras, Democritus and Epluribus. Whenever I could find any book that
bore upon the subject of evolution, and could borrow it, I have done so
while others slept.

That is a matter which rarely enters into the minds of those who go easily
and carelessly through life. Even the general superintendent of the
Academy of Science and Pugilism here in Erin Prairie, the hotbed of a free
and untrammeled, robust democracy, does not stop to think of the midnight
and other kinds of oil that I have consumed in order to fill myself full
of information and to soak my porous mind with thought. Even the O'Reilly
College of this place, with its strong mental faculty, has not informed
itself fully relative to the great effort necessary before a lecturer may
speak clearly, accurately and exhaustingly of evolution.

And yet, here in this place, where education is rampant, and the idea is
patted on the back, as I may say; here in Erin Prairie, where progress and
some other sentiments are written on everything; here where I am