IMPERSONATION
By “impersonation” we mean the art of assuming for the time being the
rôle of some character in a story or a play. We “play the part,” we
assume the carriage, the gestures, the quality of voice belonging to the
character.
How do we acquire this art? _First_: We study the part carefully till we
are sure we understand it. _Second_: We visualize the scenes, and live
them over again in our own imagination. _Third_: We begin to speak the
lines. We try different inflections, different gestures which suggest
themselves to us through our own experiences and our observation of
characters in real life which are similar to those of the character
we are depicting. This careful observation of the mannerisms and
eccentricities of real people aids very materially in interpretation.
_Finally_: We decide on the gestures and inflections which seem to us to
most nearly interpret the part, and these we practice over and over again
until they become a part of our very being, _then we are ready to “play
the part.”_
PRACTICE SELECTION
_Merchant of Venice_
_Enter old Gobbo, with a basket._
_Gobbo._—Master young man, you, I pray you, which is the way to master
Jew’s?
_Launcelot_ (_Aside_).—O heavens, this my true-begotten father! who,
being more than sand-blind, high-gravel-blind, knows me not: I will try
confusions with him.
_Gobbo._—Master young gentleman, I pray you, which is the way to master
Jew’s?
_Launcelot._—Turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but, at the
next turning of all, on your left; marry, at the very next turning, turn
of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew’s house.
_Gobbo._—By God’s sonties, ’twill be a hard way to hit. Can you tell me
whether one Launcelot, that dwells with him, dwell with him or no?
_Launcelot._—Talk you of young Master Launcelot? (_Aside._) Mark me now;
now will I raise the waters. Talk you of young Master Launcelot?
_Gobbo._—No Master, sir, but a poor man’s son: his father, though I
say’t, is an honest exceeding poor man, and, God be thank’d, well to live.
_Launcelot._—Well, let his father be what a will, we talk of young Master
Launcelot.
_Gobbo._—Your worship’s friend, and Launcelot, sir.
_Launcelot._—But, I pray you, ergo, old man, ergo, I beseech you, talk
you of young Master Launcelot?
_Gobbo._—Of Launcelot, an’t please your mastership.
_Launcelot._—Ergo, Master Launcelot. Talk not of Master Launcelot,
father; for the young gentleman—according to Fates, and Destinies, and
such odd saying, the Sisters Three, and such branches of learning—is,
indeed, deceas’d; or, as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven.
_Gobbo._—Marry, God forbid! the boy was the very staff of my age, my very
prop.
_Launcelot_ (_Aside_).—Do I look like a cudgel or a hovelpost, a staff or
a prop?—Do you know me, father?
_Gobbo._—Alack the day, I know you not, young gentleman: but, I pray you,
tell me, is my boy—God rest his soul!—alive or dead?
_Launcelot._—Do you not know me, father?
_Gobbo._—Alack, sir, I am sand-blind; I know you not.
_Launcelot._—Nay, indeed, if you had your eyes, you might fail of the
knowing me: it is a wise father that knows his own child. Well, old man,
I will tell you news of your son: give me your blessing. Truth will come
to light; murder cannot be hid long,—a man’s son may; but, in the end,
truth will out.
_Gobbo._—Pray you, sir, stand up: I am sure you are not Launcelot, my boy.
_Launcelot._—Pray you, let’s have no more fooling about it, but give me
your blessing: I am Launcelot, your boy that was, your son that is, your
child that shall be.
_Gobbo._—I cannot think you are my son.
_Launcelot._—I know not what I shall think of that: but I am Launcelot,
the Jew’s man; and I am sure Margery your wife is my mother.
_Gobbo._—Her name is Margery, indeed: I’ll be sworn, if thou be
Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood. Lord, worship’d might he
be! What a beard hast thou got! thou hast got more hair on thy chin than
Dobbin, my fill-horse, has on his tail.
_Launcelot._—It should seem, then, that Dobbin’s tail grows backward: I
am sure he had more hair of his tail than I have on my face, when I last
saw him.
_Gobbo._—Lord, how art thou chang’d! How dost thou and thy master agree?
I have brought him a present. How ’gree you now?
_Launcelot._—Well, well; but, for mine own part, as I have set up my rest
to run away, so I will not rest till I have run some ground. My master’s
a very Jew: give him a present! give him a halter: I am famish’d in his
service; you may tell every finger I have with my ribs. Father, I am glad
you are come: give me your present to one Master Bassanio, who, indeed,
gives rare new liveries: if I serve not him, I will run as far as God has
any ground.—O rare fortune! here comes the man:—to him, father, for I am
a Jew, if I serve the Jew any longer.
—Act II, Scene II, Lines 29-104.
HAMLET’S DECLARATION OF FRIENDSHIP
_Hamlet._ What ho! Horatio!
_Horatio._ Here, sweet lord, at your service.
_Hamlet._ Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man
As e’er my conversation coped withal.
_Horatio._ O, my dear lord,—
_Hamlet._ Nay, do not think I flatter;
For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast, but thy good spirits,
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of hearts,
As I do thee.
—From Act III, Scene 2.
OTHELLO’S APOLOGY
[The speech calls for great dignity, ease, and power, in both speech and
manner.]
Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approved good masters,
That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter,
It is most true; true, I have married her:
The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace;
For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration, and what mighty magic,—
For such proceeding I am charg’d withal,—
I won his daughter.
...
Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year,—the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have pass’d.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it:
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
...
This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence;
Which ever as she could with haste despatch,
She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d;
And I lov’d her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
THE SEVEN AGES
[This is a succession of purely imaginative ideas which the voice
should touch lightly. In this speech one meets always the question of
impersonation: shall the mewling infant, the whining schoolboy, the
sighing lover and the rest be imitated by the reader? It is in better
taste not to impersonate these seven characters beyond certain almost
imperceptible hints which the gayety of Jaques’s mind might naturally
throw off.]
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms:
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
—“As You Like it,” Act II, Scene 7.
SOLITUDE PREFERRED TO COURT LIFE
_Duke S._ Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam.
The season’s difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bite and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
’Tis no flattery; these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.
_Amiens._ Happy is your grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
...
_Duke S._ Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gor’d.
—“As You Like It,” Act II.
THE POTION SCENE
SCENE: JULIET’S CHAMBER
(_Enter Juliet and Nurse, who bears wedding garments._)
_Juliet_ (_looking at garments_).
Ay, those attires are best; but, gentle nurse,
I pray thee, leave me to myself to-night;
For I have need of many orisons
To move the heavens to smile upon my state,
Which, well thou knowest, is cross and full of sin.
(_Enter Lady Capulet._)
_Lady Capulet._
What are you busy, ho? need you my help?
_Juliet._
No, madam; we have cull’d such necessaries
As are behoveful for our state to-morrow:
So please you, let me now be left alone,
And let the nurse this night sit up with you;
For, I am sure, you have your hands full all,
In this so sudden business.
_Lady Capulet_ (_crossing and kissing Juliet on the forehead_).
Good night;
Get thee to bed and rest, for thou hast need.
(_Exit Lady Capulet with nurse._)
_Juliet_ (_looking after them_).
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life:
I’ll call them back again to comfort me. (_Runs to R._)
Nurse! What should she do there?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial. (_Takes vial from bosom._)
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no! (_draws dagger_) this shall forbid it.
(_Lays dagger on table._)
Lie you there. (_To vial._)
What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath ministered to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonored
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is; and yet, methinks, it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
(_Puts vial in bosom._)
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? there’s a fearful point!
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,—
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort; ...
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefathers’ joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
O, look! methinks I see my cousin’s ghost
Seeking out Romeo, ...
Stay, Tybalt, stay!—
Romeo, I come! (_Drawing out vial—then cork._)
This do I drink to thee.
(_Throws away vial. She is overcome and sinks to the floor._)
—From “Romeo and Juliet,” Act IV, Scene 3.
BANISHMENT SCENE
SCENE III, A ROOM IN THE PALACE
(_Enter Celia and Rosalind._)
_Cel._ Why, cousin; why Rosalind;—Cupid have mercy;—Not a word?
_Ros._ Not one to throw to a dog.
_Cel._ No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon curs, throw
some of them at me; come, lame me with reasons.
_Ros._ Then there were two cousins laid up; when the one should be lamed
with reasons, and the other mad without any.
_Cel._ But is all this for your father?
_Ros._ No, some of it for my father’s child: O, how full of briars is
this working-day world!
_Cel._ They are but burrs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday foolery;
if we walk not in the trodden paths, our very coats will catch them.
_Ros._ I could shake them off my coat; these burrs are in my heart.
_Cel._ Hem them away.
_Ros._ I would try; if I could cry hem, and have him.
_Cel._ Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.
_Ros._ O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself.
_Cel._ Is it possible, on such a sudden, you should fall into so strong a
liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son?
_Ros._ The duke my father lov’d his father dearly.
_Cel._ Doth it therefore ensue, that you should love his son dearly? By
this kind of chase, I should hate him, for my father hated his father
dearly; yet I hate not Orlando.
_Ros._ No ’faith, hate him not, for my sake.
_Cel._ Why should I not? Doth he not deserve well?
_Ros._ Let me love him for that; and do you love him, because I do: Look,
here comes the duke.
_Cel._ With his eyes full of anger.
(_Enter Duke Frederick, with Lords._)
_Duke F._ Mistress, despatch you with your safest haste, and get you from
our Court.
_Ros._ Me, uncle?
_Duke F._ You, cousin, within these ten days if thou be’st found so near
our public court as twenty miles, thou diest for it.
_Ros._ I do beseech your grace, let me the knowledge of my fault bear
with me: if with myself I hold intelligence, or have acquaintance with
mine own desires; if that I do not dream, or be not frantic (as I do
trust I am not), then, dear uncle, never so much as in a thought unborn,
did I offend your highness.
_Duke F._ Thus do all traitors, if their purgation did consist in words,
they are as innocent as grace itself: let it suffice thee, that I trust
thee not.
_Ros._ Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor: tell me, whereon the
likelihood depends.
_Duke F._ Thou art thy father’s daughter, there’s enough.
_Ros._ So was I, when your highness took his dukedom; so was I, when your
highness banish’d him: treason is not inherited, my lord: or, if we did
derive it from our friends, what’s that to me? my father was no traitor:
then, good my liege, mistake me not so much, to think my poverty is
treacherous.
_Cel._ Dear sovereign, hear me speak.
_Duke F._ Aye, Celia; we stay’d here for your sake. Else had she with her
father rang’d along.
_Cel._ I did not then entreat to have her stay, it was your pleasure, and
your own remorse; I was too young that time to value her, but now I know
her; if she be a traitor, so am I: we still have slept together; rose at
an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together;
And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled, and inseparable.
_Duke F._ She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence, and her patience,
Speak to the people and they pity her.
Thou art a fool: she robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright, and seem more virtuous,
When she is gone: then open not thy lips;
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass’d upon her; she is banish’d.
_Cel._ Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege;
I cannot live out of her company.
_Duke F._ You are a fool:—You, niece, provide yourself;
If you outstay the time, upon my honor,
And in the greatness of my word, you die.
(_Exeunt Duke Frederick and Lords._)
_Cel._ O my poor Rosalind: whither wilt thou go?
Wilt thou change fathers? I will give thee mine.
I charge thee, be not thou more griev’d than I am.
_Ros._ I have more cause.
_Cel._ Thou hast not, cousin,
Pr’ythee, be cheerful: know’st thou not, the duke
Hath banish’d me his daughter?
_Ros._ That he hath not.
_Cel._ No? hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teaches thee that thou and I art one:
Shall we be sunder’d? shall we part, sweet girl?
No; let my father seek another heir.
Therefore devise with me, how we may fly,
Whither to go, and what to bear with us:
And do not seek to take your charge upon you,
To bear your griefs yourself, and leave me out;
For by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,
Say what thou can’st, I’ll go along with thee.
_Ros._ Why, whither shall we go?
_Cel._ To seek my uncle.
_Ros._ Alas, what danger will it be to us,
Maids as we are, to travel so far?
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.
_Cel._ I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,
And with a kind of umber smirch my face;
The like do you; so shall we pass along,
And never stir assailants.
_Ros._ Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me in all points like a man?
A boar-spear in my hand; and in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside;
As many other mannish cowards have,
That do outface it with their semblances.
_Cel._ What shall I call thee when thou art a man?
_Ros._ I’ll have no other worse than Jove’s own page,
And therefore, look you, call me Ganymede.
But what will you be call’d?
_Cel._ Something that hath a reference to my state:
No longer Celia, but Aliena.
_Ros._ But, cousin, what if we assayed to steal
The clownish fool out of your father’s court?
Would he not be a comfort to our travel?
_Cel._ He’ll go along o’er the wide world with me;
Leave me alone to woo him: Let’s away
And get our jewels and our wealth together;
Devise the fittest time, and safest way
To hide us from pursuit that will be made
After my flight: Now go we in content,
To liberty, and not to banishment.
—From “As You Like It,” Act I.
CORYDON
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
SCENE, A ROAD-SIDE IN ARCADY
_Shepherd._ Good sir, have you seen pass this way
A mischief straight from market-day?
You’d know her at a glance, I think;
Her eyes are blue, her lips are pink;
She has a way of looking back
Over her shoulder, and alack!
Who gets that look one time, good sir,
Has naught to do but follow.
_Pilgrim._ I have not seen this maid methinks,
Though she that passed had lips like pinks.
_Shepherd._ Or like two strawberries made one
By some sly trick of dew and sun.
_Pilgrim._ A poet.
_Shepherd._ Nay, a simple swain
That tends his flocks on yonder plain
Naught else I swear by book and bell.
But she that passed you marked her well
Was she not smooth as any be
That dwells here—in Arcady?
_Pilgrim._ Her skin was the satin bark of birches.
_Shepherd._ Light or dark?
_Pilgrim._ Quite dark.
_Shepherd._ Then ’twas not she.
_Pilgrim._ The peaches side
That next the sun is not so dyed
As was her cheek. Her hair hung down
Like summer twilight falling brown;
And when the breeze swept by, I wist
Her face was in a somber twist.
_Shepherd._ No that is not the maid I seek;
Her hair lies gold against her cheek,
Her yellow tresses take the morn,
Like silken tassels of the corn,
And yet brown-locks are far from bad.
_Pilgrim._ Now I bethink me this one had
A figure like the willow tree
Which, slight and supple, wondrously
Inclines to droop with pensive grace,
And still retain its proper place.
A foot so arched and very small
The marvel was she walked at all;
Her hand in sooth, I lack for words—
Her hand, five slender snow-white birds,
Her voice, tho’ she but said “God Speed”—
Was melody blown through a reed;
The girl Pan changed into a pipe
Had not a note so full and rife.
And then her eye—my lad, her eye!
Discreet, inviting, candid, shy,
An outward ice, an inward fire,
And lashes to the heart’s desire.
Soft fringes blacker than the sloe—
_Shepherd._ Good sir, which way did this one go?
_Pilgrim._ So he is off! The silly youth
Knoweth not love in sober sooth,
He loves—thus lads at first are blind—
No woman, only womankind.
I needs must laugh, for by the mass
No maid at all did this way pass.
PART FOUR
Oratoric Reading and the Art of Public Speech
Discussion of forceful speech in making history. Value of forceful
speech. Practice selections.
HAMLET’S INSTRUCTION TO THE PLAYERS
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,—trippingly on
the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief
the town-crier spake my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your
hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and,
as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a
temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul
to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,—to
very rags,—to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part,
are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise. I would have
such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod. Pray
you avoid it.
—SHAKESPEARE.
CHAPTER XIII
ORATORIC READING AND THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEECH
Upon this important subject of public speaking, and the interpretation of
the addresses made by others, great men have thus expressed themselves:
Dr. Charles W. Eliot, formerly President of Harvard University, says:
“Have we not all seen, in recent years, that leading men of business
have a great need of a highly trained power of clear and convincing
expression? Business men seem to me to need, in speech and writing, all
the Roman terseness and the French clearness. That one attainment is
sufficient reward for the whole long course of twelve years spent in
liberal study.” Abraham Lincoln likewise said: “Extemporaneous speaking
should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the
public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are
slow to bring him business if he can not make a speech.”
Every thinker knows what a vital part eloquence plays in national as well
as individual welfare. If at first thought effective speaking seems a
simple thing and a superficial part of education, on mature thought and
consideration it will be found to be one of the most complex, vital and
difficult problems that education has to meet. And yet, notwithstanding
this complexity of the problem, the teacher is cheered by the delightful
assurance of giving the student a consciousness of his latent talents and
the ability to reveal and make use of them for the proper influencing of
his fellow men.
There is a belief fairly commonly held that only a limited few need
study the art of public speaking. Never was there a greater error or a
more fatal mistake—especially in a republic like ours, where every man
should be vitally interested in public affairs. No single citizen can
afford not to be able to stand before his fellows and clearly, pleasingly
and convincingly present his ideas upon any subject of local, state, or
national importance. It is no more an _ornamental_ accomplishment than
is grammar, penmanship or simple arithmetic. It should be as universal
as “the three r’s.” The hints and selections that follow are carefully
chosen to incite every good citizen to the acquirement of this useful and
practical aid for his own benefit as well as that of his fellows. All the
lessons and analyses that have gone before in these pages will materially
aid in the elucidation of these brief lessons.
The basis for development in Effective Speaking rests upon one’s bodily,
emotional and mental agencies of expression, and a knowledge of their
respective importance and efficient use. That which counts most for
development is conscientious practice; without which, progress is
impossible.
There are three definite means of communicating thought and feeling to
others: (a) Pantomime: face, hands, body; (b) Vocal: tone sound; (c)
Verbal: words, which are conventional symbols manifesting mental and
emotional states.
The problem, then, is to obtain a harmonious coördination of these three
languages. In other words, the content of the word when spoken should
be reflected in the tone and in the body. Thus speech becomes effective
merely because it receives its just and fair consideration.
With this general understanding let us take up and master the successive
steps which ultimately lead to a realization of the desired end.
The first important essential of effective speaking is the _Spirit of
Directness_. By this is meant natural, unaffected speech. Nothing can be
more important than that the person speaking use in public address the
ordinary elements of _Conversation_.
Hence, the first step is _practice_ in _natural_ speaking. Commit to
memory _Hamlet’s Instructions to the Players_ given on a preceding
page. Do this not line by line, but the entire selection as a whole.
_First_: Read it through silently three times to familiarize yourself
with the subject-matter. _Second_: Read it aloud at least five times.
_Third_: Speak it _conversationally_ at least five times from memory. In
this practice always be intensely conscious that you are addressing an
individual and not an audience.
Now take any of the prose or poetic selections from the earlier pages
of this book, memorize them, after studying them as the instructions
require, and speak them _directly_ and _naturally_, in the ordinary
_conversational_ style.
Sufficient practice in this is the necessary preparation for the next
step, viz., the acquiring of a natural _elevated_ conversational style,
which is merely another name for the higher type of public speaking.
Commit all, or a part, of the following selections, keeping in mind that
in speaking them you are addressing a group of people.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great
Civil War, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and
so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that
war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of
those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a
larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will
little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget
what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be
here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave
their last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that
these dead shall not have died in vain, that the Union shall, under God,
have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by
the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
* * * * *
By this time you should have mastered Ordinary Conversational Style;
Elevated Conversational Style; and Abandon and Flexibility of Speech. The
next consideration is the importance of Clearness. Clearness in speech
means making prominent central words and subordinating unimportant words,
or phrases. In other words, the logical sequence of thought must be
clearly shown. This is brought about by a variety of inflections, changes
of pitch, pause, etc. Clearness in speech is dependent upon clearness of
_Thinking_.
It is important now to give full consideration to the subject of
_Emphasis_. There are more ways than one of emphasizing your thought. The
most common way is by merely increasing the stress of voice upon a word.
This, however, is the most undignified form of emphasis. It is common
to ranters and “soap-box” orators and is one mark of an undisciplined
and uncultured man. Remember that loudness is a purely physical element,
and does not manifest thought. Such emphasis is an appeal to the brute
instinct, and is only expressive of the lower emotions. But Inflection,
Changes of Pitch, Pause, Movement and Tone-Color—as have been fully
explained in preceding pages—all appeal to the exalted nature of man.
In proportion to the nobleness of an emotion or thought, we find a
tendency to accentuate these above-named elements. Such methods of
emphasis are appropriate to the most disciplined and cultured man. More
than that, they are the surest evidence of a great personality.
Commit, then make clear to the hearer, the vital thought in the following:
He have arbitrary power! My lords, the East India Company have
not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no arbitrary power
to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the
whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because
arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any
man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his
own will, much less can one person be governed by the will of
another. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high
and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great,
immutable, preëxistent law, prior to all our devices, and prior
to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our
sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are
knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of
which we cannot stir.
Extract from President Wilson’s Inaugural Address:
We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be
modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper
to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should
be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and
seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the
excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and
only justice, shall always be our motto.
And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The nation
has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by
the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often
debauched and made an instrument of evil.
The feelings with which we face this new age of right and
opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of
God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and
the judge and the brother are one.
We know our task to be no mere task of politics, but a task
which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to
understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be
indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure
heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high
course of action. This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of
dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces
of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the
balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do.
Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try?
I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men,
to my side.
God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel
and sustain me!
SELECTIONS FOR PART FOUR
To gain control over public speech, to learn to express himself well on
his feet, the speaker must both be constantly watchful over his every-day
conversation and exercise himself much in writing. Only so can he make
his tongue obey his will.-GENUNG.
If then the power of speech is a gift as great as any that can be
named,—if the origin of language is by many philosophers even considered
to be nothing short of divine,—if by means of words the secrets of the
heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is
carried off, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded,
and wisdom perpetuated,—if by great authors the many are drawn up into
unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the
future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each
other,—if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the
human family,—it will not answer to make light of Literature or to
neglect its study; rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master
it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become
in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others, be they
many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of
life,—who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of
our personal influence.
—CARDINAL NEWMAN.
A VISION RISES
BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
A vision of the future rises.... I see a world where thrones have
crumbled and where kings are dust, the aristocracy of idleness has
perished from the earth.
I see a world without a slave, man at last is free. Nature’s forces
have by science been enslaved, lightning and light, wind and wave, frost
and flame, and all the secret subtle powers of the earth and air are the
tireless toilers for the human race.
I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music’s
myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth;
a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which
the gibbet’s shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full
reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl, trying
to win bread with a needle—the needle that has been called “the asp for
the breast of the poor”—is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or
death or suicide or shame.
I see a world without the beggar’s outstretched palm, the miser’s
heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of lies,
the cruel eyes of scorn.
I see a race without disease of flesh or brain—shapely and fair, married
harmony of form and function, and as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens,
love canopies the earth; and over all in the great dome shines the
eternal star of human hope.
CREED OF AMERICANISM
I have faith that this government of ours was divinely ordained to
disclose whether men are by nature fitted or can by education be made fit
for self-government; to teach Jew and Greek, bondman and free, alike, the
essential equality of all men before the law and to be tender and true to
humanity everywhere and under all circumstances; to reveal that service
is the highest reward of life....
I believe that the world, now advancing and now retreating, is
nevertheless moving forward to a far-off divine event wherein the tongues
of Babel will again be blended in the language of a common brotherhood;
and I believe that I can reach the highest ideal of my tradition and
my lineage as an American—as a man, as a citizen and as a public
official—when I judge my fellowmen without malice and with charity, when
I worry more about my own motives and conduct and less about the motives
and conduct of others. The time I am liable to be wholly wrong is when I
know that I am absolutely right....
I believe there is no finer form of government than the one under which
we live and that I ought to be willing to live or to die, as God decrees,
that it may not perish from off the earth through treachery within or
through assault without; and I believe that though my first right is to
be a partisan, that my first duty, when the only principles on which
free government can rest are being strained, is to be a patriot and to
follow in a wilderness of words that clear call which bids me guard and
defend the ark of our national covenant.—From “Vice-President Marshall’s
Inaugural Address.”
WHAT IS OUR COUNTRY
BY GOVERNOR NEWTON BOOTH
(_Extract from speech delivered at Sacramento, Calif., August 14, 1862._)
What is our country? Not alone the land and the sea, the lakes and
rivers, and valleys and mountains; not alone the people, their customs
and laws; not alone the memories of the past, the hopes of the future: it
is something more than all these combined. It is a divine abstraction.
You cannot tell what it is; but let its flag rustle above your head,
you feel its living presence in your hearts. They tell us that our
country must die; that the sun and the stars will look down upon the
great republic no more; that already the black eagles of despotism are
gathering in our political sky; that, even now, kings and emperors are
casting lots for the garments of our national glory. It shall not be! Not
yet, not yet, shall the nations lay the bleeding corpse of our country in
the tomb. If they could, angels would roll the stone from the mouth of
the sepulcher. It would burst the casements of the grave and come forth
a living presence, “redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled.” Not yet, not
yet shall the republic die! The heavens are not darkened, the stones are
not rent! It shall live, the incarnation of freedom; it shall live, the
embodiment of the power and majesty of the people. Baptized anew, it
shall stand a thousand years to come, the Colossus of the nations,—its
feet upon the continents, its scepter over the seas, its forehead among
the stars!—From “Notable Speeches by Notable Speakers of the Greater
West,” by kind permission of the publishers; _The Harr Wagner Company_,
San Francisco.
PIONEER CELEBRATION SPEECH
BY FREDERICK PALMER TRACEY
(_Delivered before the society of California Pioneers, September 9, 1858,
at their celebration of the eighth anniversary of the admission of the
state into the Union._)
Mr. President, and Members of the Society of California Pioneers: The
great Napoleon said, “I will review at Cherbourg the marvels of Egypt,”
and that saying, just now inscribed upon the pedestal of his statue
standing amidst the new and massive fortifications of Cherbourg, startles
England as a menace of war. England may rest in quiet. There will be
no attempt to renew the marvels of Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. But
both Napoleons may have dreamed that in the gigantic moles of Cherbourg
they might rival the grandeur and strength of the Pyramids, and in its
sculptures the glorious beauty of Memnon and the Sphinx. And, truly, the
vast dead marvels of Egypt’s architecture may be rivaled. Other tombs and
temples may be hewn in the rocks; other columns and obelisks may rise in
beauty; other sphinxes may in silence propose their eternal riddles to
other lands; and other pyramids may lift their mountain forms over the
hushed plains crouching at their feet. Greater marvels even than Egypt
ever saw may be born of necessity and science, and not Cherbourg alone,
but this and other lands may yet behold them.
But who, in any age or country, or with any people, shall renew the
marvels of California, and give to the world a second example of a
nation so suddenly created, gifted with the strength of Hercules in its
cradle,—born in the purple of its empire that shall endure forever? A
little more than ten years ago, California lay in the indolence and
silence of that summer noonday in which she had been basking for ages. A
few idle villages slept by the shores of her bays; a few squalid ranches
dotted the interior with patches of wretched cultivation. There were
herds of cattle in her valleys, but they were almost valueless for the
want of a market. There were churches, but their chiming bells woke only
the echoes of a vast solitude. The sun ripened only the harvest of wild
oats on the hills, and the beasts of prey made their lairs in security
close by the abodes of men. Seldom did the _vaquero_ in his solitary
rounds hear the dip of the oar upon our rivers. Silence, deep and
everlasting, brooded over all the land, and the lone oaks on the hills
appeared like sentinels keeping guard around the sleeping camp of nature.
The cession of the country to the United States by the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the discovery of gold in the early part of the
year of 1848, changed the whole scene as if by the power of magic. As in
the naumachia of old time, the dry arena was instantly converted into
a great lake on which contending navies struggled for the mastery; so,
instantly on the discovery of gold, California was filled with people
as if they had risen from the earth. The port of San Francisco was
crowded with vessels. The rivers were alive with the multitudes that
made them their highway, and din of commerce broke forever the silence
of centuries. It seemed as if the people had stolen the lamp of Aladdin,
and wished for the creation, not of palaces merely, but of royal cities,
and an empire of which these should be the chief places; and at their
wish, the cities of our state arose, not by slow, toilsome growth, but
complete and princely at their very birth. The rattle of the shovel
and the pick was heard in every mountain gorge, and a wide stream of
gold flowed from the Sierra to the sea. The plains, rejoicing in their
marriage to industry, bore fruitfully their yellow harvests. Villages,
hamlets, farmhouses, schools, and churches sprang up everywhere; wharves
were built, roads were opened; stage-coaches and steamers crowded all
profitable routes; lands, houses, and labor rose to an enormous value;
and plenty, with her blessings, crowned the rolling year.
I paint no exaggerated picture of this magical change. We have seen it
with our eyes; and though it seems like a dream, so is it unlike anything
in the history of the world, in the range of human experience, or in the
field where imagination is wont to revel. We know that it is all true,
and its truth is its greatest marvel.
Yet it is not to be concealed that we have reason to fear that
California’s future may not be as prosperous as her past. If free
institutions shall be established here in the simplicity of truth and
justice; if public morality shall be substituted for the wild, passionate
life of our earlier times; if industry and frugality shall expel
indolence and thriftlessness from among us; if the people shall be made
to feel that California is their home, and be controlled by the great
ambition of making it a home worth loving and defending; if we shall be
united for the promotion and protection of our own state interests, and
shall banish from among us all influence of those who do not belong to
us,—then indeed we cannot fail to secure a glorious future for our young
state. But if we fail in the great duties of upright men and patriotic
citizens, we can only expect to—
“Run anew the evil race the old nations ran;
And die, like them, of unbelief in God and wrong of man.”
That California has the material resources to make her not merely one of
the first, but the very first, of the states of the Union, no one can
doubt; but the fostering care of the general government, and the exertion
of all the energies of our own people will be required to develop those
resources and make our state what it is capable of becoming. I have
dreamed of the time when that great highway of commerce around the Cape
of Good Hope, opened to the world by the Portuguese navigators of the
fifteenth century, should be abandoned, and long caravans of merchant
ships, treading the desert ocean that lies at our west, should bring
to our wharves the merchandise of China and the Indies, and give to us
the profits of that vast trade which has built so many of the cities of
Europe and of Asia; when along the great Atlantic and Pacific Railroad,
from San Francisco to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to the Atlantic
seaboard, the transit of this wealth of the world, like a turbid stream
turned through our miners’ sluice-boxes, should everywhere deposit gold
as it passed. If California and the general government shall ever be
aroused upon this subject, and this great railway—the mightiest in its
results of any enterprise ever projected by man—shall be completed, a
revolution will be accomplished in our state, the marvels of which will
be second only to those that accompanied our first settlement of the
territory. Our population, no longer stinted to a few hundred thousand,
will suddenly be counted by millions. Every valley will be fat with
grain, and the yellow harvest will wave on every hillside. The hamlets
will rise to villages, the villages to towns, and the towns to regal
cities. Like the redwoods of our mountains, the masts of the vessels
of all nations will be forests in our ports, and the white sails in
the offing shall flock together as white doves when they come home to
their nests. Then, capital will seek investment among us, and enterprise
and industry will add wealth to wealth. Then will the hidden riches of
the mines be explored, and larger and more secure investments afford a
profit that now is hardly dreamed of. Every resource of the state will
be developed, and California will become the mistress of the Pacific,
rivaling not merely the richest commercial states of our own confederacy,
but the most powerful maritime nations that sit by the shores of the
Atlantic.
Such California once was; such California yet may be. You, pioneers, who
meet to-day to celebrate the eighth anniversary of her admission as a
state of the Union,—you, and those whom you represent, are the founders
of this new commonwealth, and on the direction you give her institutions
and her enterprise her destiny for good or evil will depend.
I congratulate you, Pioneers of California, on the proud position you
occupy.
“You are living, you are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.”
You are presiding at the birth of a nation; you shape its destinies and
mold its future according to your own will. Your works will speak for
you in the coming ages. If you make California glorious, you will be
immortal; if you make her base and vile, she will return her shame on
your own heads.
It was my lot, in 1848, to witness the Revolution that overturned the
throne of France, and drove Louis Philippe into exile, and I thought
it the fortune of a lifetime to be present at the downfall of a great
government. But how much more is the blood of ambition stirred by the
creation of an empire,—of an empire that for centuries to come is to sit
the undisputed mistress of these vast seas that spread themselves at our
feet!
Pioneers, the men who come after you will rule only the hour in which
they live. You are the masters of the approaching centuries. They come
bending like slaves at your feet, and wait to know your pleasure. It is
yours, if you will, to fill those centuries with the glory of California
and your own high renown. All that you do in these early plastic times
of the state will remain stamped upon her forever, and you sit here,
masters, while the monuments of your own immortal fame are being built.
Pioneers of California, the eyes of the world are fixed upon this young
state; they are fixed upon you. A great trust is committed to your hands
by the events that have made you pioneers. Take care that you discharge
that trust with honor to yourselves, and so that California may achieve
the glorious destiny that is her due. Take care that you so conduct the
youth of this state, that, centuries hereafter, your descendants may say
proudly of their ancestors, “He came in with the pioneers.”—From “Notable
Speeches by Notable Speakers of the Greater West,” by the kind permission
of the publisher, the _Harr Wagner_ Company, San Francisco.
[Frederick Palmer Tracy was a California pioneer, and attorney-at-law
in San Francisco, and one of the founders of the Republican party in
California. He was an eloquent political speaker in the early days when
his party was in a hopeless minority. He was a member of the California
delegation to the Chicago convention which nominated Abraham Lincoln
for President of the United States, and was appointed on the Committee
on Platform and Resolutions. He drafted the famous platform of that
convention, which was adopted by the committee as he wrote it, with only
slight changes. He was engaged in the Lincoln campaign to stump the state
of New York, and died during that campaign, worn out by exposure and loss
of sleep.]
THE REDWOODS
BY W. H. L. BARNES
(_Delivered at a midsummer “jinks” of the Bohemian Club of San
Francisco._)
The possessor of a name more ancient than the crusaders will show you,
in the land of his birth, ancestral trees that surround his lordly
domain, and proudly exhibit some gnarled and ugly oak, which by him is
associated with some distant event in his own family, or with the history
of the hoary races of the brave nation of which he forms a part. Here
his ancestors builded a castle before the Middle Ages, with defensive
moat and parapet, with keep and dungeon, all long since fallen into
ruin,—melted in the unperceived decay of ages, or bruised into it by the
vigor of the battering-ram of some gallant and feudal company.
He will say to you, “All these are mine. They are part of my race, and my
race is of them.” But what are all his possessions—castle, moat, dungeon,
or gnarled oak—beside the ancient brotherhood of venerable trees to which
we have been admitted, and whose stately silence we have been permitted
to break? Our trees were old before the Roman invaded Britain; old before
the Saxon followed Hengist and Horsa; old before the Vikings sailed the
northern seas. For ages piled upon ages, even before letters were known,
before history commenced to make its record of the doings of nations and
races, these trees and their ancestors builded and renewed their leafy
castles.
The groupings of the present monarchs of the forest show that these are
but the descendants of still more ancient growths; were once nothing but
saplings that sprung from the superabundant life of some giant trunk long
since vanished, and whose grave is sentineled by his stalwart children.
How shall we measure the vigor and force which they possess? How shall
we comprehend by what method the stately body, ever rising in monumental
force toward the skies, draws its being from the deep and busy fingers
of the roots, and from them lifts the alchemized earth and water higher
and still higher, until both feed and nourish the smallest leaf and
spear-point of the topmost shaft,—spear-point that, in its turn, is
destined in some future age to become a stalwart trunk, crowding with its
growth ever upward and onward towards the stars?
Who shall tell how, through the eons of the long ago, these trees
have been silent and majestic watchers of the night and dawn and day
of the world’s life? How shall we conjecture how long they have been
welcoming the sun in his rising, and have caught his last and lingering
caress as he has disappeared in the glory of the evening sky? How long
have they been the vigil keepers of the night, and watched the silent
constellations sailing through the immensity of space? Who shall tell us
if these trees caught, perhaps, the earliest song of the stars of the
morning, while above and beyond them, unnumbered comet and meteor have
shone and vanished?
How came these trees to this continent? Have they ever lived and
burgeoned in some other happy land? or are they the fruit of one sole and
giant extravagance of nature, exulting in the uppermost luxury of force,
and reveling in the very fullness of all power? Shall man solve the
mystery? Nature is full of lessons yet to be learned, but nowhere in air
or earth or water is there more awe-inspiring strangeness than in these
great growths whose wonder we have studied, but with study fruitless of
revelation.
To me, during the days we spent in the forest, the contemplation of the
redwoods was never for a moment wearisome. I have looked up along their
marvelous length in the early morning, when the frondent and topmost
spear caught the first glimpse of the sun’s glory, and I have seen his
afternoon rays flashing and glinting on emerald bough and purple trunk,
and at last losing themselves in the depths of a solemn and impenetrable
shade. I have lain at night on the dry earth and looked up at the closing
vista of the dark boughs fretting the moonlight and shutting out the
sparkle of the stars, until their weird shapes seemed summited in their
very pathway; and I saw, when Pan killed Care upon the mountain-side that
overhung the grove, such an illumination of the glory of the trees in
purple and crimson and scarlet as shall forever make the ablest effort of
the scenic artist stale, tawdry, unendurable.
THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(_Delivered from the steps of the Capitol at Washington, 1865._)
FELLOW COUNTRYMEN: At this second appearing to take the oath of the
Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than
there was at first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to
be pursued seemed very fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four
years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth
on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the
attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new
could be presented.
The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as
well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably
satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no
prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought
to avoid it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this
place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent
agents were in the city seeking to destroy it with war—seeking to
dissolve the Union and divide the effects by negotiation. Both parties
deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation
survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and
the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not
distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part
of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All
knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union by war, while the Government claimed no
right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which
it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the
conflict might cease when, or even before, the conflict itself should
cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental
and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and
each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any
men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread
from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be
not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither
has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the
world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but
woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of
God, must needs come, but which having continued through His appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South
this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came,
shall we discern there any departure from those divine attributes which
the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope,
fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by
the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be repaid
by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago,
so still it must be said, that the judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right
as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to
bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve
and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
BY WENDELL PHILLIPS
If I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the
lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great
captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of
Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you who think no marble
white enough on which to carve the name of the father of his country.
But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who
has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant
testimony of his enemies,—men who despised him because he was a negro and
a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.
Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven,
was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never
saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was
fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? England,—the best
blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen,—the best blood
of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen,—their equals.
This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the
despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of
slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within
four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other.
Yet out of this mixed and, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a
thunderbolt, and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe,
the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood
in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest
blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if
Cromwell was a general, this man was a soldier.
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your age, go back with me to the
commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let
him be either American or European; let him have the ripest training of
university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical
life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show
me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will
wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this
negro,—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content
to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of his
sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by
the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the
right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes
up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.
Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those
fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them
what they think of the negro’s courage.
I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over
broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word.
I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the
state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him
Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his
empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his
dominions.
You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but
with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing,
the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman,
Hampden for England, Lafayette for France, choose Washington as the
bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her
pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the
name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
THE TWO GEORGES
BY W. H. RHODES
Between the years of our Lord 1730 and 1740, two men were born on
opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, whose lives were destined to exert
a commanding influence on the age in which they lived, as well as to
control the fortunes of many succeeding generations.
One was by birth a plain peasant, the son of a Virginia farmer; the other
an hereditary Prince, and the heir of an immense empire.
Go with me for one moment to the crowded and splendid metropolis of
England. It is the evening of the 4th of June, 1734. Some joyful
event must have occurred, for the bells are ringing merrily, and the
inhabitants are dressed in holiday attire. Nor is the circumstance
of a private nature, for banners are everywhere displayed, the vast
city is illuminated, and a thousand cannon are proclaiming it from
their iron throats. The population seems frantic with joy, and rush
tumultuously into each other’s arms, in token of a national jubilee.
Tens of thousands are hurrying along toward a splendid marble pile,
situated on a commanding eminence, near the River Thames, whilst from
the loftiest towers of St. James’s Palace the national ensigns of St.
George and the Red Cross are seen floating on the breeze. Within one of
the most gorgeously furnished apartments of that royal abode, the wife
of Frederic, Prince of Wales, and heir apparent to the British Empire,
has just been delivered of a son. The scions of royalty crowd into the
bed-chamber, and solemnly attest the event as one on which the destiny of
a great empire is suspended. The corridors are thronged with dukes, and
nobles, and soldiers, and courtiers. A Royal Proclamation soon follows,
commemorating the event, and commanding British subjects everywhere,
who acknowledge the honor of Brunswick, to rejoice, and give thanks to
God for safely ushering into existence George William Frederic, heir
presumptive of the United crowns of Great Britain and Ireland.
Just twenty-two years afterward that child ascended the throne of his
ancestors as King George the Third.
Let us now turn our eyes to the Western Continent, and contemplate a
scene of similar import, but under circumstances of a totally different
character. It is the 22nd of February, 1732. The locality is a distant
colony, the spot the verge of an immense, untrodden and unexplored
wilderness, the habitation a log cabin, with its chinks filled in with
clay, and its sloping roof patched over with clapboards. Snow covers
the ground, and a chill wintry wind is drifting the flakes, and moaning
through the forest. Two immense chimneys stand at either end of the
house, and give promise of cheerful comfort and primitive hospitality
within, totally in contrast with external nature. There are but four
small rooms in the dwelling, in one of which Mary Ball, the wife of
Augustine Washington, has just given birth to a son. No dukes or
marquises or earls are there to attest the humble event. There are no
princes of the blood to wrap the infant in the insignia of royalty, and
fold about his limbs the tapestried escutcheon of a kingdom. His first
breath is not drawn in the center of a mighty capitol, the air laden with
perfume, and trembling to the tones of soft music and the “murmurs of low
fountains.” But the child is received from its mother’s womb by hands
embrowned with honest labor, and laid upon a lowly couch, indicative only
of a back-woodsman’s home and an American’s inheritance. He, too, is
christened George, and forty-three years afterward took command of the
American forces assembled on the plains of old Cambridge.
But if their births were dissimilar, their rearing and education were
still more unlike.
From his earliest recollection the Prince heard only the language of
flattery, moved about from palace to palace, just as caprice dictated,
slept upon the cygnet’s down, and grew up in indolence, self-will and
vanity, a dictator from his cradle. The peasant boy, on the other hand,
was taught from his infancy that labor was honorable, and hardships
indispensable to vigorous health. He early learned to sleep alone amid
the dangers of a boundless wilderness, a stone for his pillow, and the
naked sod his bed; whilst the voices of untamed nature around him sang
his morning and his evening hymns. Truth, courage and constancy were
early implanted in his mind by a mother’s counsels, and the important
lesson of life was taught by a father’s example, that when existence
ceases to be useful it ceases to be happy.
Early manhood ushered them both into active life; the one as king over
extensive dominions, the other as a modest, careful, and honest district
surveyor.
Having traced the two Georges to the threshold of their careers, let us
now proceed one step further, and take note of the first great public
event in the lives of each.
For a long time preceding the year 1753 the French had laid claim to all
the North American continent west of the Alleghany Mountains, stretching
in an unbroken line from Canada to Louisiana. The English strenuously
denied this right, and when the French commandant on the Ohio, in 1753,
commenced erecting a fort near where the present city of Pittsburgh
stands, and proceeded to capture certain English traders, and expel them
from the country, Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, deemed it necessary
to dispatch an agent on a diplomatic visit to the French commandant and
demand by what authority he acted, by what title he claimed the country,
and order him immediately to evacuate the territory.
George Washington, then only in his twenty-second year, was selected by
the governor for this important mission.
It is unnecessary to follow him, in all his perils, during his wintry
march through the wilderness. The historian of his life has painted in
imperishable colors his courage, his sagacity, his wonderful coolness
in the midst of danger, and the success which crowned his undertaking.
Memory loves to follow him through the trackless wilds of the forest,
accompanied by only a single companion, and making his way through wintry
snows, in the midst of hostile savages and wild beasts, for more than
five hundred miles, to the residence of the French commander. How often
do we not shudder, as we behold the treacherous Indian guide, on his
return, deliberately raising his rifle, and leveling it at that majestic
form; thus endeavoring, by an act of treachery and cowardice, to deprive
Virginia of her young hero! And oh! with what fervent prayers do we not
implore a kind Providence to watch over his desperate encounter with
the floating ice, at midnight, in the swollen torrent of the Alleghany,
and rescue him from the wave and the storm. Standing bareheaded on the
frail craft, whilst in the act of dashing aside some floating ice that
threatened to engulf him, the treacherous oar was broken in his hand, and
he is precipitated many feet into the boiling current. Save! oh, save
him, heaven! for the destinies of millions yet unborn hang upon that
noble arm!
Let us now recross the ocean. In the early part of the year 1764, a
ministerial crisis occurs in England, and Lord Bute, the favorite of the
British monarch, is driven from the administration of the government.
The troubles with the American colonists have also just commenced to
excite attention, and the young King grows angry, perplexed, and greatly
irritated. A few days after this, a rumor starts into circulation that
the monarch is sick. His attendants look gloomy, his friends terrified,
and even his physicians exhibit symptoms of doubt and danger. Yet he
has no fever, and is daily observed walking with uncertain and agitated
step along the corridors of the palace. His conduct becomes gradually
more and more strange, until doubt gives place to certainty, and the
royal medical staff report to a select committee of the House of Commons
that the King is threatened with insanity. For six weeks the cloud
obscures his mental faculties, depriving him of all interference with
the administration of the government, and betokening a sad disaster
in the future. His reason is finally restored, but frequent fits of
passion, pride and obstinacy indicate but too surely that the disease is
deep-seated, and a radical cure impossible.
Not long after his return from the West, Washington was offered the
chief command of the forces about to be raised in Virginia, to expel
the French; but, with his usual modesty, he declined the appointment,
on account of his extreme youth, but consented to take the post of
lieutenant-colonel. Shortly afterward, on the death of Colonel Fry, he
was promoted to the chief command, but through no solicitations of his
own. Subsequently, when the war between France and England broke out in
Europe, the principal seat of hostilities was transferred to America,
and his majesty, George III, sent over a large body of troops, under
the command of favorite officers. But this was not enough. An edict
soon followed, denominated an “Order to settle the rank of the officers
of His Majesty’s forces serving in America.” By one of the articles of
this order, it was provided “that all officers commissioned by the King
should take precedence of those of the same grade commissioned by the
governors of the respective colonies, although their commissions might
be of junior date;” and it was further provided, that “when the troops
served together, the provincial officers should enjoy no rank at all.”
This order was scarcely promulgated—indeed, before the ink was dry—ere
the Governor of Virginia received a communication informing him that
George Washington was no longer a soldier. Entreaties, exhortations and
threats were all lavished upon him in vain; and to those who, in their
expostulations, spoke of the defenseless frontiers of his native state,
he patriotically but nobly replied: “I will serve my country when I can
do so without dishonor.”
In contrast with this attitude of Washington, look at the conduct of
George the Third respecting the colonies, after the passage of the Stamp
Act. This act was no sooner proclaimed in America, than the most violent
opposition was manifested, and combinations for the purpose of effectual
resistance were rapidly organized from Massachusetts to Georgia. The
leading English patriots, among whom were Burke and Barré, protested
against the folly of forcing the colonies into rebellion, and the city
of London presented a petition to the king, praying him to dismiss
the Granville ministry, and repeal the obnoxious act. “It is with the
utmost astonishment,” replied the king, “that I find any of my subjects
capable of encouraging the rebellious disposition that unhappily exists
in some of my North American colonies. Having entire confidence in the
wisdom of my parliament, the great council of the realm, I will steadily
pursue those measures which they have recommended for the support of the
constitutional rights of Great Britain.” He heeded not the memorable
words of Burke, that afterward became prophetic. “There are moments,”
exclaimed this great statesman, “critical moments in the fortunes of all
states, when they who are too weak to contribute to your prosperity may
yet be strong enough to complete your ruin.” The Boston port bill passed,
and the first blood was spilt at Lexington.
It is unnecessary to review in detail the Revolution. Let us pass to the
social position of the two Georges in after-life.
On the 2d of August, 1786, as the king was alighting from his carriage
at the gate of St. James, an attempt was made on his life by a woman
named Margaret Nicholson, who, under pretense of presenting a petition,
endeavored to stab him with a knife which was concealed in the paper.
The weapon was an old one, and so rusty that, on striking the vest of
the king, it bent double, and thus preserved his life. On the 29th of
October, 1795, whilst his majesty was proceeding to the House of Lords,
a ball passed through both windows of the carriage. On his return to St.
James the mob threw stones into the carriage, several of which struck
the king, and one lodged in the cuff of his coat. The state carriage was
completely demolished by the mob. But it was on the 15th of May, 1800,
that George the Third made his narrowest escapes. In the morning of that
day, whilst attending the field exercise of a battalion of guards, one
of the soldiers loaded his piece with a bullet and discharged it at the
king. The ball fortunately missed its aim, and lodged in the thigh of a
gentleman who was standing in the rear. In the evening of the same day
a more alarming circumstance occurred at the Drury Lane Theater. At the
moment when the king entered the royal box, a man in the pit, on the
right-hand side of the orchestra, suddenly stood up and discharged a
large horse-pistol at him. The hand of the would-be assassin was thrown
up by a by-stander, and the ball entered the box just above the head of
the king.
Such were the public manifestations of affection for this royal tyrant.
He was finally attacked by an enemy that could not be thwarted, and
on the 20th of December, 1810, he became a confirmed lunatic. In this
dreadful condition he lingered until January, 1820, when he died, having
been the most unpopular, unwise and obstinate sovereign that ever
disgraced the English throne. He was forgotten as soon as life left his
body, and was hurriedly buried with that empty pomp which but too often
attends a despot to the grave.
The mind, in passing from the unhonored grave of the prince to the last
resting-place of the peasant boy, leaps from a kingdom of darkness to one
of light.
Let us now return to the career of Washington. Throughout the
Revolutionary War he carried in his hand, like Atropos, the destinies
of millions; he bore on his shoulders, like Atlas, the weight of a
world. It is unnecessary to follow him throughout his subsequent career.
Honored again and again by the people of the land he had redeemed from
thraldom, he has taken his place in death by the side of the wisest and
best of the world’s benefactors. Assassins did not unglory him in life,
nor has oblivion drawn her mantle over him in death. The names of his
great battlefields have become nursery words, and his principles have
imbedded themselves forever in the national character. Every pulsation of
our hearts beats true to his memory. His mementoes are everywhere around
and about us. Distant as we are from the green fields of his native
Westmoreland, the circle of his renown has spread far beyond our borders.
In climes where the torch of science was never kindled; on shores still
buried in primeval bloom; amongst barbarians where the face of liberty
was never seen, the Christian missionary of America, roused perhaps from
his holy duties by the distant echo of the national salute, this day
thundering amidst the billows of every sea, or dazzled by the gleam of
his country’s banner, this day floating in every wind of heaven, pauses
over his task as a Christian, and whilst memory kindles in his bosom the
fires of patriotism, pronounces in the ear of the enslaved pagan the
venerated name of WASHINGTON.
Wherever tyranny shall lift its Medusan head, wherever treason shall plot
its hellish schemes, wherever disunion shall unfurl its tattered ensign,
there, oh there, sow his deeds in the hearts of patriots and republicans.
For from these there shall spring, as from the dragon’s teeth sown by
Cadmus of old on the plains of Heber, vast armies of invincible heroes,
sworn upon the altar and tomb at Mount Vernon, to live as freemen, or as
such to die!
THE LESSONS OF THE TRAGEDY
(_The Murder of President McKinley_)
BY DAVID STARR JORDAN
We meet to-day under the sway of a number of different emotions. We
would express our sorrow at the untimely death of a good man. We would
show our regret that our nation has lost the Chief Magistrate of its
choice. We would express our sympathy with the gentle woman who has been
suddenly bereft of the kindest and most considerate of husbands. We are
filled with shame that in our Republic, the land where all men are free
and equal wherever they behave themselves as men, the land which has no
rulers save the public servants of its own choosing, a deed like this
should be possible. We would express our detestation of that kind of
political and social agitation which finds no method of working reform
save through intimidation and killing. We would wish to find the true
lessons of this event and would not let even the least of them fall on
our ears unheeded.
And one plain lesson in this: Under democracy all violence is treason.
Whosoever throws a stone at a scab teamster, whosoever fires a shot at
the President of the United States, is an enemy of the Republic. He is
guilty of high treason in his heart, and treason in thought works itself
out in lawlessness of action.
The central fact of all democracy is agreement with law. It is our law;
we have made it. If it is wrong we can change it, but the compact of
democracy is that we change it in peace. “The sole source of power under
God is the consent of the governed.” This was written by Cromwell across
the statute books of Parliament. This our fathers wrote in other words
in our own Constitution. The will of the people is the sole source of
any statute you or I may be called on to obey. It is the decree of no
army, the dictum of no president. It is the work of no aristocracy; not
of blood nor of wealth. It is simply our own understanding that we have
to do right, shall behave justly, shall live and let our neighbor live.
If our law is tyrannous, it is our ignorance which has made it so. Let
it pinch a little and we shall find out what hurts us. Then it will be
time to change. Laws are made through the ballot, and through the ballot
we can unmake them. There is no other honest way, no other way that is
safe, and no other way that is effective. To break the peace is to invite
tyranny. Lawlessness is the expression of weakness, of ignorance, of
unpatriotism. If tyranny provokes anarchy, so does anarchy necessitate
tyranny. Confusion brings the man on horseback. It was to keep away both
anarchy and tyranny that the public school was established in America.
Three times has our nation been called upon to pass into the shadow of
humiliation, and each time in the past it has learned its severe lesson.
When Lincoln fell, slavery perished. To the American of to-day human
slavery in a land of civilization is almost an impossible conception,
yet many of us who think ourselves still young can remember when half of
this land held other men in bondage and the dearest hope of freedom was
that such things should not go on forever. I can remember when we looked
forward to the time when “at least the present form of slavery should be
no more.” For democracy and slavery could not subsist together. The Union
could not stand—half slave, half free.
The last words of Garfield were these: _Strangulatus pro Republica_.
(Slain for the Republic.) The feudal tyranny of the spoils system which
had made republican administration a farce, has not had, since Garfield’s
time, a public defender. It has not vanished from our politics, but its
place is where it belongs—among the petty wrongs of maladministration.
Again a president is slain for the Republic—and the lesson is the homely
one of peace and order, patience and justice, respect for ourselves
through respect for the law, for public welfare, and for public right.
For this country is passing through a time of storm and stress, a flurry
of lawless sensationalism. The irresponsible journalism, the industrial
wars, the display of hastily-gotten wealth, the grasping monopoly, the
walking delegate, the vulgar cartoon, the foul-mouthed agitator, the
sympathetic strike, the unsympathetic lockout, are all symptoms of a
single disease—the loss of patriotism, the decay of the sense of justice.
As in other cases, the symptoms feed the disease, as well as indicate
it. The deed of violence breeds more deeds of violence; anarchy provokes
hysteria, and hysteria makes anarchy. The unfounded scandal sets a
hundred tongues to wagging, and the seepage from the gutter reaches a
thousand homes.
The journal for the weak-minded and debased makes heroes of those of
its class who carry folly over into crime. The half-crazy egotist
imagines himself a regicide, and his neighbor with the clean shirt is
his oppressor and therefore his natural victim. Usually his heart fails
him, and his madness spends itself in foul words. Sometimes it does not,
and the world stands aghast. But it is not alone against the Chief
Magistrate that these thoughts and deeds are directed. There are usually
others within closer range. There is scarcely a man in our country,
prominent in any way, statesman, banker, merchant, railway manager,
clergyman, teacher even, that has not, somewhere, his would-be Nemesis,
some lunatic, with a sensational newspaper and a pistol, prepared to take
his life.
The gospel of discontent has no place within our Republic. It is true,
as has often been said, that discontent is the cause of human progress.
It is truer still, as Mr. John P. Irish has lately pointed out, that
discontent may be good or bad, according to its relation to the
individual man. There is a noble discontent which a man turns against
himself. It leads the man who fails to examine his own weaknesses, to
make the needed repairs in himself, then to take up the struggle again.
There is a cowardly discontent which leads a man to blame all failure on
his prosperous neighbor or on society at large, as if a social system
existed apart from the men who make it. This is the sort of discontent
to which the agitator appeals, that finds its stimulus in sensational
journalism. It is that which feeds the frenzy of the assassin who would
work revenge on society by destroying its accepted head.
It is not theoretical anarchism or socialism or any other “ism” which
is responsible for this. Many of the gentlest spirits in the world
today call themselves anarchists, because they look forward to the time
when personal meekness shall take the place of all statutes. The gentle
anarchism of the optimistic philosopher is not that which confronts us
to-day. It is the anarchy of destruction, the hatred of class for class;
a hatred that rests only on distorted imagination, for, after all is
said, there are no classes in America. It is the hatred imported from
the Old World, excited by walking delegates whose purpose it is to carry
a torch through society; a hatred fanned by agitators of whatever sort,
unpractical dreamers or conscienceless scoundrels, exploited in the
newspapers, abetted by so-called high society with its display of shoddy
and greed, and intensified by the cold, hard selfishness that underlies
the power of the trust. All these people, monopolists, social leaders,
walking delegates, agitators, sensationalists, dreamers, are alien to our
ways, outside the scope of our democracy, and enemies to good citizenship.
The real Americans, trying to live their lives in their own way, saving
a little of their earnings and turning the rest into education and
enjoyment, have many grievances in these days of grasping trusts and
lawless unions. But of such free Americans our country is made. They
are the people, not the trusts or the unions, nor their sensational
go-betweens. This is their government, and the government of the people,
by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. This
is the people’s President—our President—who was killed, and it is ours to
avenge him.
Not by lynch law on a large or small scale may we do it; not by anarchy
or despotism; not by the destruction of all that call themselves
anarchists, not by abridging freedom of the press nor by checking freedom
of speech. Those who would wreak lawless vengeance on the anarchists are
themselves anarchists and makers of anarchists.
We have laws enough already without making more for men to break. Let
us get a little closer to the higher law. Let us respect our own rights
and those of our neighbor a little better. Let us cease to tolerate
sensational falsehood about our neighbor, or vulgar abuse of those in
power. If we have bad rulers, let us change them peacefully. Let us put
an end to every form of intimidation, wherever practiced. The cause that
depends upon hurling bricks or epithets, or upon clubbing teamsters
or derailing trains, cannot be a good cause. Even if originally in
the right, the act of violence puts the partisans of such a cause in
the wrong. No freeman ever needs to do such things as these. For the
final meaning of democracy is peace on earth, good-will towards men.
When we stand for justice among ourselves we can demand justice of the
monopolistic trust. When we attack it with clear vision and cool speech
we shall find the problem of combination for monopoly not greater than
any other. And large or small, there is but one way for us to meet
any problem: to choose wise men, clean men, cool men, the best we can
secure through our method of the ballot, and then to trust the rest in
their hands. The murder of the President has no direct connection with
industrial war. Yet there is this connection, that all war, industrial
or other, loosens the bonds of order, destroys mutual respect and trust,
gives inspiration to anarchy, pushes a foul thought on to a foul word, a
foul word on to a foul deed.
We trust now that the worst has come, the foulest deed has been
committed, that our civil wars may stop, not through the victory of
one side over the other, the trusts or the unions now set off against
each other, but in the victory over both of the American people, of the
great body of men and women who must pay for all, and who are the real
sufferers in every phase of the struggle.
_Strangulatus pro Republica_—slain for the republic. The lesson is plain.
It is for us to take it into our daily lives. It is the lesson of peace
and good-will, the lesson of manliness and godliness. Let us take it to
ourselves, and our neighbors will take it from us.
All civilized countries are ruled by public opinion. If there be a lapse
in our civic duties, it is due to a lapse in our keenness of vision,
our devotion to justice. This means a weakening of the individual man,
the loss of the man himself in the movements of the mass. Perhaps
the marvelous material development of our age, the achievements of
huge coöperation which science has made possible, has overshadowed
the importance of the individual man. If so, we have only to reassert
ourselves. It is of men, individual men, clear-thinking, God-fearing,
sound-acting men, and of these alone, that great nations can be
made.—From “The Voice of the Scholar,” by kind permission of author and
publishers, _Paul Elder & Co._, San Francisco.
WHAT IS TO BE THE DESTINY OF THIS REPUBLIC
BY JUDGE STORY
When we reflect on what has been and what is, how is it possible not to
feel a profound sense of the responsibilities of this republic to all
future ages! What vast motives press upon us for lofty efforts! What
brilliant prospects invite our enthusiasm! What solemn warnings at once
demand our vigilance and moderate our confidence!
The old world has already revealed to us, in its unsealed books, the
beginning and end of all its marvelous struggles in the cause of liberty.
Greece! lovely Greece! “the land of scholars and the nurse of arms,”
where sister republics, in fair processions, chanted the praise of
liberty and the good—where and what is she? For two thousand years the
oppressors have bound her to the earth. Her arts are no more. The last
sad relics of her temples are but the barracks of a ruthless soldiery;
the fragments of her columns and her palaces are in the dust, yet
beautiful in ruin. She fell not when the mighty were upon her. Her sons
were united at Thermopylæ and Marathon; and the tide of her triumph
rolled back upon the Hellespont. She was conquered by her own factions.
She fell by the hands of her own people. The man of Macedonia did not
the work of destruction. It was already done by her own corruptions,
banishments, and dissensions.
Rome! republican Rome! whose eagles glanced in the rising and setting
sun,—where and what is she? The eternal city yet remains, proud even
in her desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the majesty of
religion, and calm as in the composure of death. The malaria has traveled
in the parts won by the destroyers. More than eighteen centuries have
mourned over the loss of the empire. A mortal disease was upon her before
Cæsar had crossed the Rubicon; and Brutus did not restore her health by
the deep probings of the senate-chamber. The Goths, and Vandals, and
Huns, the swarms of the north, completed only what was begun at home.
Romans betrayed Rome. The legions were bought and sold, but the people
offered the tribute-money.
And where are the republics of modern times, which cluster around
immortal Italy? Venice and Genoa exist but in name. The Alps, indeed,
look down upon the brave and peaceful Swiss, in their native fastnesses;
but, the guarantee of their freedom is in their weakness, and not in
their strength. The mountains are not easily crossed, and the valleys are
not easily retained. When the invader comes, he moves like an avalanche,
carrying destruction in his path. The peasantry sink before him. The
country, too, is too poor for plunder, and too rough for a valuable
conquest. Nature presents her eternal barrier on every side, to check
the wantonness of ambition. And Switzerland remains, with her simple
institutions, a military road to climates scarcely worth a permanent
possession, and protected by the jealousy of her neighbors.
We stand the latest, and, if we fall, probably the last experiment of
self-government by the people. We have begun it under circumstances of
the most auspicious nature. We are in the vigor of youth. Our growth
has never been checked by the oppression of tyranny. Our constitutions
never have been enfeebled by the vice or the luxuries of the world. Such
as we are, we have been from the beginning, simple, hardy, intelligent,
accustomed to self-government and self-respect. The Atlantic rolls
between us and a formidable foe. Within our own territory, stretching
through many degrees of latitude, we have the choice of many products,
and many means of independence. The government is mild. The press is
free. Religion is free. Knowledge reaches or may reach every home. What
fairer prospects of success could be presented? What means more adequate
to accomplish the sublime end? What more is necessary than for the people
to preserve what they themselves have created?
Already has the age caught the spirit of our institutions. It has already
ascended the Andes, and snuffed the breezes of both oceans. It has
infused itself into the life-blood of Europe, and warmed the sunny plains
of France and the lowlands of Holland. It has touched the philosophy
of the north, and, moving onward to the south, has opened to Greece the
lesson of her better days.
Can it be, that America, under such circumstances, can betray herself?
That she is to be added to the catalogue of republics, the inscription
upon whose ruin is: “They were, but they are not!” Forbid it, my
countrymen: forbid it, Heaven!
I call upon you, fathers, by the shades of your ancestors, by the dear
ashes which repose in this precious soil, by all you are, and all you
hope to be, resist every project of disunion; resist every attempt to
fetter your consciences, or smother your public schools, or extinguish
your system of public instruction.
I call upon you, mothers, by that which never fails in woman, the love of
your offspring, to teach them, as they climb your knees, or lean on your
bosoms, the blessings of liberty. Swear them at the altar, as with their
baptismal vows, to be true to their country, and never forsake her.
I call upon you, young men, to remember whose sons you are—whose
inheritance you possess. Life can never be too short, which brings
nothing but disgrace and oppression. Death never comes too soon, if
necessary in defense of the liberties of our country.
MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS
(_An oration delivered in San Francisco, May 30, 1901._)
BY SAMUEL M. SHORTRIDGE
This day is consecrate to the nation’s dead and living soldiers.
Uncovered beside the hallowed graves of those who fought and fell in the
sacred cause of Union and Liberty, a people of brave men and loyal women
stand with hearts oppressed with gratitude, and listen to the story of
their heroes’ deeds and death. We come in thankfulness—matron and maid,
sire and lad—to scatter fragrant flowers on the honored dust, and for
the martyrs who sleep unknown but not unwept. We come to grasp the hands
of the surviving heroes who responded to their country’s cry of anguish
when the temple of liberty was assailed and her sacred altars desecrated;
who endured the long, weary march, the cruel deprivations of the camp,
the fevered heat of noon and the chilling cold at night; who stormed the
frowning heights where treason was intrenched, and met upon an hundred
fields the brave but misguided hosts that in madness and folly sought to
destroy the edifice dedicated with the prayers and consecrated by the
valor and blood of the patriot fathers; who carried the tattered but dear
flag of their country through fire and flood and the “valley and shadow
of death,” and paused not until it waved victorious in every state and
was respected on every sea. We come to shed proud and happy tears for
those who gladly gave up all for their imperiled country, in order to
preserve the precious fruits of the Revolutionary struggle and to keep
the flag of Washington triumphant in the sky. We come to welcome and to
dower with our love the loyal and self-sacrificing men who left the plow,
the forge, the desk, to rescue from the jaws of death the greatest, best,
and truest republic that ever blessed the earth.
A common thought pervades all hearts. This is not a day for vainglorious
boasting, but for gratitude and praise. We come in sorrow, not in anger,
and our hearts are filled with sadness, not revenge. We are not here to
upbraid, to accuse, to exult over the defeat of brethren and brave men,
to denounce what is no more, to open wounds by the healing touch of Time
made whole. No, no; Heaven forbid that this sacred day should stir our
hearts to other than feelings of forgiveness, of gratitude, of pride, and
of love. Rather let it be said we come to—
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain.
For those who died to save the republic, I have tears and eulogy; for
those who died to overthrow it, I have tears and silence.
Not as citizens of a torn and discordant Union, not as blinded partisans,
but as children of a common and reunited country, we gather to give
expression of our gratitude to those who by their sacrifices and their
martyrdom made this land the home of freedom, and the banner of the stars
the symbol of one people, one constitution, and one destiny.
We are gathered here—the multitude has put on a suit of woe and stands
beside the graves where heroes sleep—not to revive bitter memories, not
to cause heartaches or awaken animosities, dead, let us fervently hope,
forever, but for a better, worthier, and more patriotic purpose: to teach
the rising generation that the dead fell not in vain; to impress upon
their youthful hearts that America does not forget the travail through
which, by the inscrutable wisdom of Heaven, she has passed, that she
loves her loyal sons and daughters with more than Cornelian affection,
and treasures them now, and will treasure them forever, as her unfading
glory.
And so, my countrymen, we come to sorrow and to rejoice,—to sorrow over
the loved and lost, to rejoice over their magnificent achievements and a
Union saved and disenthralled by their devotion. As in the Roman days the
wives and mothers went out upon the Appian Way to meet the home-returning
legions,—some to fall upon the bosoms of husbands, fathers, or sons, and
shed tears of joy, and some to search in vain for dear ones amid the
broken, decimated ranks, but wept not, because they had died bravely in
defense of Rome, her altars, and her fires,—so we welcome to-day the
scarred and wounded, the remnant of hard-fought fields; we stretch forth
our arms to embrace them; we cover them with garlands emblematic of our
love, and scatter flowers in their way to tread upon.
But for the ones who answer not, who sleep the dreamless sleep of death,
who died with the face of mother near their hearts, the name of country
on their lips, what shall we say? They cannot hear our words nor see
the offering of our hands; they are past all battles, all marches, all
victories, all defeats; “on Fame’s eternal camping-ground their silent
tents are spread,” and the troubled drum disturbs their sleep no more.
And yet, O sacred shades of the unreplying dead, we feel your presence
now. We hear the shot of Sumter that wakened all the land; we see you
coming down from the mountains, up from the plains, and marching away to
battle, leaving behind, alas; forever, faithful wife, loving children,
aged mother, venerable father; we see you by the campfires dimly
burning; we see you in the cannon-smoke and hurricane of war; we hear
the command to charge, which you obey, how bravely, with bosom bared and
parched, thirsty lips; we see you wounded and bleeding; we see you in
the hospitals of fever and pain; we see you again with your regiment,
with courage undaunted, your love of home and flag intensified; we see
your comrades fall around you like flowers of spring cut down; we see
you captured and hurried away; we see you wasting in awful dungeons,
languishing in prison-pens; we catch the faint accent of your tongues as
you murmur a prayer for your country and for the loved ones that come to
you in your dreams; we see you encounter death in the gaunt and hideous
form of starvation and quail not; we see you die! Die for what? Die for
whom? Die for Union and Liberty. Die for us and generations yet to be.
Dead and living soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic, you, you
engaged in the holiest cause that ever received the approving smile of
Heaven; you preserved the Union, “One and inseparable,” with all its
blessed memories, with all its priceless benefits, with all its exalted
and encouraging hopes. You carried the banner of your country, full
high advanced through the darkest hour and wildest storm that ever
overwhelmed a nation, until the returning and radiant morn of victory and
peace blessed and hallowed it. Moved by the loftiest purposes, inspired
by the sublimest sentiments, faithful unto death, you went forth, not
to subjugate, not to enslave, not to tear down, but to rescue, to
uplift, and to make the name of that liberty for which Warren died and
to preserve which Lincoln gave the full measure of his devotion; in the
name of all we are and hope to be,—the glorious present and the grander
future,—we bow to-day and pay you the poor tribute of our love and tears.
All hail to the saviors of this beloved land! Humbly we lay our offerings
on the dead. Reverently we invoke the blessing of Almighty God on the
declining years of the living. Long may their eyes be gladdened by the
flag they saved; long may their hearts be consoled by the assurance that,
while the monuments reared to haughty pride and selfish ambition sink
beneath the despoiling hand of time, the soldier’s humble grave, though
unadorned by costly urn or marble shaft, will forever be his country’s
hallowed ground, where future patriots shall come to rekindle the fires
of their devotion and to renew and reaffirm their allegiance to the land
by his sacrifices made truly, grandly free. And so we bow before the
heroes who saved our country; we stand uncovered beside the graves of
the martyrs who died in her sacred cause. Peace and honor to the living;
honor and peace to the dead.
The Civil War, of the sad ravages and awful agony of which we are this
day reminded, was the inevitable result of the “irrepressible conflict
between opposing and enduring forces,”—between freedom and slavery.
Removed sufficiently from those troublous days to look at facts
calmly and to speak of them without anger, let us be just, let us
be truthful. The courts had exalted slavery, had hedged it round by
law, and nationalized it. In that most august tribunal—in that high
place immortalized by the transcendent greatness of a Marshall and
the unfathomed learning of a Story, which had witnessed the marvelous
displays of oratory of Pinckney, Webster and Choate—in the Supreme Court
of the United States—slavery met and vanquished freedom. The Dred Scott
decision gave up this nation to bondage, and made it possible, under the
law, to sell wives and babes in Faneuil Hall and to call the roll of
slaves on the sacred spot where Warren fell! Thenceforth Congress could
not interfere with slavery; states were powerless to prevent it. And thus
it came to pass that in the land of Washington, Franklin, and Wayne, in
the land of Adams, Henry, and Sherman, in the land whose sons died for
liberty on a hundred fields—who stormed the walls of Quebec and left
their blood on the snow at Valley Forge—in this our beloved land—in this
republic—slavery was king. The time to gather the bitter fruit of the
accursed upas tree planted at Jamestown in 1620 was near at hand.
An awful storm, pregnant with death and woe, was gathering, and the
people sought a leader. They were sore distressed with a multitude of
counsel, and they cried:
God give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue,
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog,
In public duty and in private thinking!
For while the tricksters, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions, and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps!
Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps!
In the midst of mingled doubts and fears, when weak and timid politicians
masquerading under the name of statesmen hesitated to grapple with the
monstrous evil that threatened to advance upon and overwhelm the last
remaining bulwarks of freedom, when the right and true path was well nigh
lost sight of, and lovers of liberty were ranged under different banners,
waiting for a Moses who should lead them out of Egyptian bondage, the
Great Captain came. He came, and thenceforth all seemed clear. Simple in
speech, plain in manner, straightforward in action, tender as a child,
bold as a lion, fearless as a hero, at once courageous and humble,
lofty and lowly, he came to speak and to act. Born of Southern parents
who had witnessed the depressing and blighting effects of slavery, and
reared in the broad prairies of the West, whose very winds sang Liberty,
he realized the curse of bondage and the blessing of freedom. From the
unfelled forest, from the log cabin and the country store, from humble
forum and obscure dwelling, from out the ranks of the people, the Leader
came. He came, and statesmen bowed before him; he spoke, and a nation
hearkened to his counsel. Devoted to truth and the right, opposed to
falsehood and the wrong, scorning the tricks and subterfuges of the
self-seeking, and abhorring with his whole heart and soul the mean and
base, loving his country with a devotion that made him forgetful of all
else save the preservation of the Union, the incomparable Leader rose. In
judicial tribunal and halls of state, in capital and village, in mansion
and log cabin, in crowded cities, and out on the boundless prairies of
the West, men listened to his words, and saw, as they had never seen
before, the darkness, the light, the path,—the wrong, the right, and
the remedy. “You must be either all slave or all free.” These were his
prophetic words. Who was this man that came unheralded out of the West?
Who was this man that rose above the great statesmen of his day—who was
as earnest as Phillips, as gifted as Baker, who was more profound than
Seward, more learned than Chase, more logical than Douglas, more eloquent
than Everett? Who was he that combined in one soul the simplicity of a
child, the wisdom of a sage, and the foresight of a prophet? Need I utter
his sacred name? Wheresoever among men there is a love for disinterested
patriotism and sublime attachment to duty, wheresoever liberty is
worshiped and loyalty exalted, his name and deeds are known. His image
is in all hearts, his name to-day is on all lips. That grand and lofty
man was the rail-splitter of Illinois,—beloved, sainted, immortal Abraham
Lincoln, statesman, philosopher, and patriot, the greatest, noblest,
purest soul that ever was enwrapped in clay, to walk the earth,—Abraham
Lincoln, the emancipator of a race; the savior of the Union!
Strangely enough, the election of the Presidency of this great and
good and just man was the signal for revolt. “In your hands,” said
he in his first inaugural address,—“In your hands, my dissatisfied
fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You
have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I
shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.”
But the blow was struck,—the blow that was ultimately to destroy slavery,
and make our country free indeed,—“a land without a serf, a servant, or a
slave.”
The war to preserve the integrity of the nation was marked by great
battles, weary marches, long sieges, and splendid deeds of daring. Brave
men met brave men, and gallant soldiers stormed forts and heights by
gallant soldiers defended. If America wept for the folly and madness of
some, yet was she proud of the courage of all her sons. We think to-night
of the mighty struggle that ended with Appomattox’s cloudless day; of
all the fields where saber flashed, and cannon roared, and patriot sons
sealed their devotion with their blood. The world knows the result.
Freedom triumphed. The Union was saved, Liberty survived, slavery
perished and is dead upon our soil forevermore,—dead by the sword of
immortal Grant, “dead by the hand of Abraham Lincoln, dead by the justice
of Almighty God.”
Rejoice, O human hearts and human lips, that Liberty survived. Rejoice,
O men of the North, that slavery is dead. Rejoice, O men of the South,
that slavery is dead. Rejoice, O sons of the Republic, that the crown was
restored to the brow of liberty, that, reunited and reconciled, loyal and
true, we stand to-day, hand in hand, heart beating with heart, under the
blessed and ever-triumphant banner of the Union.
And thus may we ever stand,—one people, one nation,—no North, no South,
no East; no West,—one altar, one love, one hope.
And thus may we ever stand,—brothers in peace, brothers in war,—and
“highly resolved that government of the people, by the people, and for
the people shall not perish from the earth.”
And thus may we ever stand,—a Union of hearts and of states, and “teach
men that Liberty is not a mockery, and a republic is not another name for
feebleness and anarchy.”
And standing thus, the world cannot prevail against us in war or in peace.
Fellow-citizens, in this hour of mourning we may without impropriety
indulge ourselves in feelings of pride over the glorious deeds of our
heroes dead and living. Pittsburgh Landing, Chattanooga, and Vicksburg;
Lookout Mountain, Gettysburg, and Antietam; the Wilderness, Atlanta, and
Richmond,—all are eternal witnesses to the deathless valor and sublime
courage of those upon whose graves we have tenderly laid our flowers and
upon whose brows we have lovingly placed the laurel wreath of victory and
peace. No poor words of mine can tell them of our love or add unto their
fame; the one is unspeakable, the other as broad and all-comprehensive as
the earth, as high and spotless as the stars.
Upon the hearts of many heroes who made our country free—who with their
blood washed away the ebon blot on our country’s shield—inexorable death
has laid his hand, and the high and the low, the mighty general and the
humble private, repose alike in the equal grave. All-conquering “time,
the tomb-builder,” is day by day mustering out the noble army that went
forth to save, to make and to preserve us a nation. Halleck, Thomas,
Meade, McClellan, Hancock, McDowell, Garfield, Logan, Sheridan, Sherman,
Harrison, Porter, McKinley,—all have been gathered to their fathers, gone
to grasp the hands of their comrades on the peaceful shores of Eternal
Rest.
But of him, the simple, silent, steadfast man; of him that marshaled
order out of chaos, gave direction to mighty armies and led them to final
victory; of him who made the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln
a glorious reality, and eternal fact which broke the chains that held a
race in bondage; of him who bore his great honors so modestly and meekly
in war and peace; of him who by his genius added to our arms a luster as
imperishable as his fame, and left his countrymen the priceless legacy
of an untarnished and immortal name; of him who was ambitious, not as a
Cæsar, not as a Napoleon, but as a Washington, with no higher aim, no
loftier purpose, than to serve his country, not to wear a crown; of him
who stood before uncovered kings and was saluted by the emperors of the
earth, but never forgot his humble origin nor lost his sympathy for the
poor and lowly; of him whose deeds, from duty and necessity, not from
choice, were war, but whose heart ever yearned, whose voice ever pleaded,
for peace,—what human tongue can speak of the spotless, peerless General
Grant? His mighty work is done, his triumphal march is ended, his name is
for all time. Reverently and tenderly we lay our flowers upon his tomb
to-day; gratefully and lovingly we breathe his sacred name. Calm, cool,
and undaunted, victorious in war, magnanimous in peace,—
Nothing can cover his high fame, but Heaven;
No pyramids set off his memories,
But tie eternal substance of his greatness;
To which I leave him.
But of the rank and file, of the unknown dead, what can be said? Sleep
on, O humble soldier boy, sleep on! No more shall the midnight attack,
the fierce charge, or the bugle-call to arms rouse thee from thy rest.
Sleep on in thy lowly sepulcher, guarded by thy country’s tenderest love
and pillowed on her grateful heart. Whether it be beneath polished marble
and sculptured alabaster reared by the hands of affection, or beneath the
green sod watered by tears of love; whether it be beneath rich, fragrant
flowers blooming in perennial freshness and cared for by dear ones left
behind, or in the lonely, pathless woods where in darkness and thick
gloom you laid down your life; whether it be in fertile valley where
your life blood reddened the grass of the meadow, or in the intrenchment
of death, facing the pitiless storm of shot and shell; whether it be in
the prison-pen, where your heart-throbs grew faint, but your undying
love for the Stars and Stripes could not be seduced into deserting your
country, or in sultry mountain-passes where you wearied of the march,
and, fever-stricken, fell down to die,—wheresoever it be, on land or in
ocean depth, O humble soldier boy, sleep on! Thy cause was liberty; thy
purpose, Union; thy object, a nation purged and purified of slavery. Thy
great deeds are thy eternal monument. Written on the nation’s heart and
in the everlasting Book of Life thy name shall live forevermore, fadeless
to eternity.
Oh, the victory, the victory
Belongs to thee!
God ever keeps the brightest crown for such as thou.
He gives it now to thee.
Oh, young and brave, and early and thrice blest!
Thrice, thrice, thrice blest!
Thy country turns once more to kiss thy youthful brow,
And takes thee gently, gently to her breast,
And whispers lovingly, ‘God bless thee—bless thee now,
My darling, thou shalt rest!’
My countrymen, one and all,—if enemies in the dark days of estrangement,
brothers now and forever,—let us rejoice that under God we have a
reunited country, that the Union was preserved, that Liberty, crowned and
sceptered, sits enthroned in the constitution; and with our eyes fixed on
the one and only banner of the loyal heart, let us reverently resolve to
show ourselves in some measure worthy of our ancestors and our brethren
who fought and died to make this blessed land the home of freedom, free
lips and free hands, forever.
The dead soldiers of the republic, the heroes of the Revolution, the
heroes of 1812, the heroes of 1848, the heroes of 1861, the heroes of
1898,—they sleep in glory. But what of the living? O soldiers of the
republic, wheresoe’er you are to-night, on land or sea, in frigid north
or torrid south, on frontier guarding the outposts of civilization, or in
far Luzon defending with sleepless vigilance the flag of our hearts, God
bless you and keep you. Be of good cheer. Your country believes in you
and loves you. If you return, she will clasp you close to her heart and
bestow on you the rewards of peace; if you fall fighting her battles, she
will be mother to your children and treasure you as she treasures those
who preserved the flag you have lifted and hold on high.
My countrymen, the heroes of every battlefield of the republic—from
Bunker Hill to Santiago—look down to-night from their portals of eternal
light and beseech us to be true to the principles in vindication of
which they died. Nay, more: from every land made sacred by heroism, from
every dungeon of agony and death where truth has suffered on the rack
for conscience’ sake, from Marathon and Thermopylæ, from Runnymede and
Bannockburn, from the graves of Kosciusko and Hampden, from the scaffolds
of Sidney and Emmet, comes a voice beseeching us to be faithful to our
mission, to guard jealously the citadel of Liberty, and to vindicate by
our wisdom and righteousness and justice the holy cause of Freedom.
Oh! can we stand unmoved when thus addressed? Let us heed these warning
voices and hearken to these solemn admonitions, and here and now, on this
Memorial Day, with all the memories and lessons of the past fresh in our
hearts, let us renew our devotion and reaffirm our allegiance to the
cause of Liberty and Union, let us rededicate and reconsecrate ourselves
to the service of our Country.
How shall we fittingly commemorate the honored dead? When Greece was
threatened by the Persian army, Athens sent out a handful of her bravest
sons to meet the myriad hosts of Darius. Oh! the intrepid courage, the
sublime patriotism, of that Grecian band as they advanced across the
plain of Marathon with leveled spears to fall upon the heathen horde
that came to plunder and destroy. To commemorate the splendid victory
of Miltiades over Darius, of enlightened civilization over brutish
barbarism, the Athenians erected a mound on that historic plain, and as
a special and the highest mark of honor buried their heroes where they
had fallen. The light of Athens has gone out forever; her glory has
departed, never to return; her power has vanished, never to be regained;
the voice of her sublime philosophers and peerless orators is heard no
more; the language of Homer and Demosthenes lives only in immortal type,
the priceless heritage of the human race; the matchless art of Phidias
and Praxiteles is of the past, and the unapproached masterpieces of the
Parthenon have been eaten away by the gnawing tooth of irreverent time;
a melancholy gloom of utter desolation and departed splendor broods over
the “City of the Violet Crown,” the once first and proudest city in the
world. But, after a lapse of more than twenty centuries,—centuries which
have seen the death of the old and the birth of the new civilizations,
the rise and fall of dynasties, the creation and decay of empires,—after
a lapse of more than twenty centuries the earthen mound at Marathon still
remains, clad to-day in the flowers of spring, an eternal witness to the
valor and heroism of Athens, a solemn reminder that those who die in
defense of Liberty and Country shall not perish from the memory of men.
Let the monument to our heroes be the land they saved, domed and canopied
by the heavens that smiled upon their cause. For so long as the sun
in his coming kisses and glorifies that blessed banner, or, sinking,
burnishes our mountain tops with crimson gold; so long as yonder waves
roll inward to break and die upon the shore; so long as the American
heart beats to the transports of a true and lofty patriotism, or man has
aspirations of light and liberty; so long as the nation lives; so long as
the flag of Washington and Lincoln is in the sky,—even so long will our
heroes’ fame survive and be an inspiration to the Union’s sons forever
and forever.
SENATOR VEST’S EULOGY ON THE DOG
“Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn
against him and become his enemy. His son and daughter that he has reared
with loving care may become ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest
to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may
become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It
flies away from him when he may need it most. Man’s reputation may be
sacrificed in a moment of ill considered action. The people who are prone
to fall on their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the
first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon
our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this
selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves
ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog.
“Gentlemen of the Jury: A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and
poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground,
when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may
be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to
offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the
roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he
were a prince.
“When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and
reputation falls to pieces he is as constant in his love as the sun in
its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an
outcast into the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks
no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against
danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all
comes and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away
in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way,
there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his
paws and his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true
even to death.”
CHAPTER XIV
PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR THE AFTER-DINNER SPEAKER
The practice of speaking at the banquet table is an ancient custom. In
modern life it is the most universally used form of public speaking.
Every educated man and woman sooner or later will be expected to take
part in post-prandial occasions. This need not be an irksome task for any
provided they consider carefully a few vital essentials, keeping in mind
that the after-dinner speech is primarily to please. If it ever be to
instruct, it is that kind of instruction which comes by the stimulation
of our higher sensibilities.
Essentials:
1. Have something worth while to say.
2. This something must be appropriate to the occasion and to the guests.
3. Know who are to be present and who are to speak.
4. Know how much time is allotted you.
5. Strive your utmost to enjoy yourself and let what you say appear as a
spontaneous outgrowth of your environment.
6. Avoid using old jokes and hackneyed quotations.
7. Avoid stiff formality. Radiate kindliness and good fellowship toward
all.
8. Do not apologize. Let your appreciations and the fact that “some one
else could have responded better,” that “you are unprepared,” etc.,
be taken for granted. Don’t waste time on these follies. Get down to
business.
9. Have your speech carefully prepared and stick to it.
10. Remember that this is a time that reveals your true self, so let the
best in you shine forth.
Let us discuss more fully some of the more important essentials. One
should never begin his speech with an apology. How boresome it is to
hear a speaker express surprise at being called upon; regretting he is
totally unprepared; telling us that some one else could have spoken on
this subject far better than he, etc., etc., etc. This is never in place
and it is never necessary. On one occasion many prominent men and women
were banqueting together in Chicago. Dr. George Vincent, then a member of
the faculty of the University of Chicago, an orator himself of no mean
ability, was toastmaster. A program of unusual length had been prepared.
Under any ordinary chairman it would have kept the guests there until
morning. Dr. Vincent arose, and in a clear, brief and terse introduction
called attention to the long program. Then he said, addressing the
speakers who sat at his table: “Each of you can give us the heart of your
message in three, certainly not more than four minutes. I shall expect
you, therefore, to go right to the heart of your subject. We will take it
for granted that you are not prepared, that some one else could do better
than you, and all the rest of the apologetic introductions. The moment
your time is up I shall bring down the gavel as a forceful reminder that
you must stop.”
The result was wonderful. Every speaker did as the chairman required. The
audience heard a dozen or more bright, snappy addresses, full of thought
and wit, with scarcely a redundant word. What otherwise would have been a
long, tedious and wholly wearisome occasion was converted into a function
of grace, a noble inspiration and a never-to-be-forgotten spiritual
uplift.
Let the after-dinner speaker note that his speech should seem to grow
naturally out of the environment and fit the occasion and the guests—that
is, it should be _appropriate_. The manner of presenting it should
be _genial_ and kindly. This is no time or place to give vent to any
personal animosity or didacticism. There is no disposition, Nature says,
for a man with a well-filled stomach to digest heavy intellectual food.
He would much rather be amused and entertained—that is, the occasion is
a _convivial_ one. Do not mistake this to mean triviality. Above all
things, whatever you say or whatever you do, do not be frivolous. And
finally that indispensable quality _originality_ should distinguish both
the matter and the manner of each speaker. This may mean nothing more
than a new way of presenting an old subject.
The very fact that an after-dinner speech should be short, sparkling
and fit the one who delivers it, makes it a difficult form of public
address, and consequently necessitates very careful preparation. It is
more than “to tell a joke, make a platitude and give a quotation.” While
the after-dinner speech is supposed, primarily, to please, and _certainly
should do so_, it is often made the means of conveying the most forceful
lessons in business, religion, and patriotism. But when, in conveying
these lessons, the speaker becomes prosy, or _fails to please_, he is out
of place and should never have been invited.
CHAPTER XV
THE CULTIVATION OF THE MEMORY
Nothing is of greater importance to the intelligent and thoughtful
man or woman who would become a public speaker than the cultivation
of the memory. Its pleasures and joys are no less than its importance
and usefulness. Well might Richter exclaim: “Recollection is the only
paradise from which we cannot be turned out.” How it brings back to
us joys of sights, sounds and emotions. One has been thrilled with a
gorgeous landscape, a brilliant and vivid sunset, a majestic mountain,
a vision of feminine beauty, or an inspiring exhibition of physical
prowess. He has seen the proud march of armed men, or the gathering of
gay and happy throngs in the public play-grounds and parks. A thousand
memories of sights bring back joys and delights of other days. So is it
with the memories of sounds—concerts, symphonies, stirring songs, martial
music, and the sweet voices of loved ones passed away.
It can readily be seen that memory is the practical basis of all
knowledge. Indeed there is no conscious knowledge without memory. No
man can think without it; there is no business success; no writing, no
poetry, no literature, no oratory, no conversation, no music, no art, no
psychology, no _anything of mental life_ without memory. Without memory
there is no identity. If I cannot remember myself of an hour ago, of
yesterday, of many yesterdays, I cannot be a personality. Life would be
disconnected and therefore incoherent and useless.
A poor memory is ever a hindrance if not a positive curse. It is as if
one’s legs should fail to bear him up when he starts to walk, run, leap,
or as if his eyes should refuse to see, or saw but dimly when he wished
to observe. It is a never-ending cause of confusion, embarrassment,
irritation, and loss. No man in any walk of life ever yet succeeded
without a good memory, and many a public speaker owes his success to
his always ready power over this faculty. Abraham Lincoln is a striking
example of this truth.
STOKES’S GOLDEN RULE OF MEMORY
Psychologists have not yet determined what the memory is, but all are
agreed that it can be cultivated. A few general propositions can be
laid down, which, if faithfully followed, are certain to bring desired
results. Stokes, the great memory teacher of the Royal Polytechnic
Institution of London, formulated his golden rule of memory as follows:
“Observe, reflect, link thought with thought, and think of the
impressions.”
STRENGTHENING THE OBSERVATION
Careful observation is the basis of memory. To observe is to regard with
attention, to note with interest, in other words _to see well_. How many
people are there who see _well_? All persons who are not blind can see,
but do they see _well_? It must be confessed that good observers are
rare, and that is one reason why good memories are rare. The discipline
of the observation is one of the most important ends of all mental
education. Teach a child to observe and he can and will educate himself.
Indeed he cannot help becoming educated. Without discipline of the
observation one may pass through ten colleges and yet remain uneducated.
What is the reason the Indian can follow a trail so much better than a
white man? His life has depended upon his powers of observation. From
the earliest days of his dawning intelligence his perceptive faculties
were aroused and highly developed by the struggle for his very existence.
He was compelled to watch the animals in order that he might avoid
those that were dangerous, and catch those that were good for food; to
follow the flying birds that he might know when to trap them. He watched
the fishes as they spawned and hatched; the insects as they bored and
burrowed; the plants and trees as they grew and budded, blossomed and
seeded. The tracks of animals, whether upon the sand, the snow, the mud,
or more solid earth, soon became familiar signs to him. All these and
many other things in nature he learned to know thoroughly in his simple
and primitive manner. This knowledge in his daily struggle for existence
came by means of his attention to details. Hence to the untrained white
man his powers of observation seem little short of marvelous.
Children from their earliest years should be taught with systematic
persistence to cultivate this faculty. They should be urged to tell all
they can see in pictures. A table spread with diverse articles covered
with a cloth is also a good means of disciplining close attention and
memory. Let the children stand around it and, after removing the cloth,
give them a minute, or less, for observation, then re-cover. Then give
each child a chance to tell how many articles there are; what they are;
and what is their relative position to each other, etc. An intelligent
teacher will invent a score of devices for cultivation of the powers of
observation, and nothing will better repay her endeavors.
Henry Ward Beecher used to illustrate the difference between observers
and non-observers by telling a tale of two city lads whom he once sent
out into the country. One he called “Eyes” and the other “No Eyes.” Each
was to go to a certain place and report upon what he saw. The one on his
return had seen little. The other—Eyes—was filled to overflowing with the
things he had observed.
It is undoubtedly due to the development of this faculty that the
hat-boys and hotel clerks are able to call the guests by name and return
to them their own belongings.
Read the novels of Frank Norris, of Jack London, of Winston Churchill
or any successful writer, the lines of any truly great poet, and the
ordinary mind cannot fail to be impressed with the wonderful store of
knowledge gleaned from a thousand and one sources possessed by their
writers. Think of the wealth of observations poured forth by a Shakspere,
a Browning, a Goethe. Every page contains them by the score—observations
of facts in nature, art, science, literature, human action, and indeed
of everything under the sun. Hence, if you would be an educated man you
_must_ observe.
SUGGESTIVE METHODS TO PURSUE
To discipline the power of observation, begin consciously _to see_ and
then immediately to test your own remembrance of what you see. See
slowly, see surely. Be sure you have seen correctly. There is so much
uncertainty in all of our mental processes. If it is a pile of books you
are seeing, be sure, positive, that there are eleven. Do not content
yourself by saying there are about ten or twelve and let it go at that.
Note their size, color of their bindings, and, if possible, note each
title.
There are some librarians who seldom forget a book after once seeing
it, and can tell not only its appearance, but its place on the book
shelves, and the appearance of its neighbors on either side. This is
one of the qualifications of an efficient library assistant. What is
true of the librarian is likewise true of other people. What makes the
difference between an efficient clerk in a book-store and one who is
merely passable? It is this power of observation and memory which makes
his knowledge of books held in stock reliable.
Let us continue our suggestions. In looking over a landscape be definite
in your seeing. Be sure that the river is to the left, and not to the
right; that a certain tree is a sycamore, and not a poplar; that the
green on the hillside is the young, fresh green of the dawn of the
spring, rather than the richer green of the summer. What is it that makes
the landscape artist? His power to portray depends upon his ability to
discern and observe. The poet and orator do the same, but they make their
pictures with words and phrases instead of pigments and canvas.
In seeing anything, get hold of every fact possible—size, position,
color, relative importance, and, then, before you conclude your
observations, close your eyes and reconstruct the scene mentally. Do this
over and over again, until you add and add to your mental picture things
you had before failed to see. Do not merely catalogue mentally, but see
everything in its own place, in full detail, and in its relation to every
other thing. A comparatively short period of this kind of discipline will
enable you to do things that will not only astound your friends, but
will be a source of infinite pleasure and, if used intelligently in your
business or profession, profit to yourself.