"Men!"--he began, and paused. The word died with a prolonged echo at the end of the hall, the faces regarding him, hopefully, cynically, wearily, were alike arrested, engrossed. Six hundred eyes were turned slightly upward. With an even graceless flow that reminded Anthony of the rolling of bowling balls he launched himself into the sea of exposition.
"This bright and sunny morning you picked up your favorite newspaper and you found an advertisement which made the plain, unadorned statement that you could sell. That was all it said--it didn't say 'what,' it didn't say 'how,' it didn't say 'why.' It just made one single solitary assertion that you and you and you"--business of pointing--"could sell. Now my job isn't to make a success of you, because every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure; it's not to teach you how to talk, because each man is a natural orator and only makes himself a clam; my business is to tell you one thing in a way that will make you know it--it's to tell you that you and you and you have the heritage of money and prosperity waiting for you to come and claim it."
At this point an Irishman of saturnine appearance rose from his desk near the rear of the hall and went out.
"That man thinks he'll go look for it in the beer parlor around the corner. (Laughter.) He won't find it there. Once upon a time I looked for it there myself (laughter), but that was before I did what every one of you men no matter how young or how old, how poor or how rich (a faint ripple of satirical laughter), can do. It was before I found--myself!
"Now I wonder if any of you men know what a 'Heart Talk' is. A 'Heart Talk' is a little book in which I started, about five years ago, to write down what I had discovered were the principal reasons for a man's failure and the principal reasons for a man's success--from John D. Rockerfeller back to John D. Napoleon (laughter), and before that, back in the days when Abel sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. There are now one hundred of these 'Heart Talks.' Those of you who are sincere, who are interested in our proposition, above all who are dissatisfied with the way things are breaking for you at present will be handed one to take home with you as you go out yonder door this afternoon.
"Now in my own pocket I have four letters just received concerning 'Heart Talks.' These letters have names signed to them that are familiar in every house-hold in the U.S.A. Listen to this one from Detroit: