Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1873-10-01

POCKET PICKING.-With the opening
of the busy season come the announce
ments of eminent musical and dramatic
artists who will shortly deign to appear
before US, of eloquent lecturers who ask
only chance to amuse and instruct US,
and all sorts Of people who hope to come
before the amusement seeking people for
trivial compensation and for fame. Oper-
attic troupes are being loudly heralded,
theatrical managers are making noble
promises, Europe sends Nilsson and Sal
vni aDd scores of other celebrities to our
shores; the lecture bureaus are constructing
routes Of travel for the men we want to
hear and the women who want to be heard
aud ali over the land the notes of prepara-
ton for what is styled 6" the amusement
season" resouud. In the years now gone
and apparently forever, when lecturers
had purpose and spoke to further it; be-
fore every college senior was regarded as
proper person to be placed on the list of
orators, to die without hearing whom is to
leave naif of life's mission unaccompll shed;
before every ambitious girl with no talent
for housework and no capacity for any
thing in particular, felt inspired to put on
" store Clothes" and mount the platform
before halfpaid clergymen Qike Murray
and Beecher we do not mean) tried to
make both ends meet by secular disoour
ses, the lecture system was one OF the
ere Iitable and useful features of our civil
lzation. Now it is a snare and nuisance.
The man who writes puffs for sewing ma
chimes at so much line in other months
of the year, at this time devotes himself
to constructing glittering panegyrics on the
talents and requirements, mental and Or
namental, Of asprants to platform honors
and pecuniary rewards. The whole sys
tenn is demoralzed and demoralizing. No
longer does man speak with honorable
exceptions,) because he has something to
say which he must say or neglect his mis-.
sion, but he enters upon season OF lectur-
ing only as a genteel and unproscribed way
of picking pockets, of getting living out
of the public, of gratifying vanity and
laziness and taking the money which other
people have earned without making re-
turn of one per cent. on the dollar. 1t is
a true saying. Who can deny 1t! we
have read again and again in papers pub
lished in our New England towns COM
plants of the worthlessness, the worse than
worthless, of the bepufed orators sent
among them by the lecture bureaus, to
carry off hard-earned money from the
pockets of people who can ill afford to
spare it, and leave in return the recollec-
tion of an hours bufoonery, vulgarity and
empty words. So, too, in the musical and
dramatic lines Little Mss Smith has had
lot of money thrown away in cutivating
a mediocre voice. Have her iitably be.
puffed, get some influential perso.'s re-
commendation and send her off to get back
the wasted money out of defenseless audi
euces. Madam Antediluviano, having
outIived her voice in Europe, comes to
America to revel for season in the spoil'
of our ignorance. An organized, deliberate
profitable system Of respectable pocke
picking is the only name which can b.
applied to this business. The gross exor
bltance which marks the prices asked By
these chartered brigands peeds moro atten
tion than We have space to give it here
Sunday Herald.