6. Repeat them from memory.

7. Expand them into a speech, using your own words.

8. Illustrate practically what would you do, if in the midst of a speech

on Progress, your memory failed you and you stopped suddenly on the

following sentence: "The last century saw marvelous progress in varied

lines of activity."

9. How many quotations that fit well in the speaker's tool chest can you

recall from memory?

10. Memorize the poem on page 42. How much time does it require?

CHAPTER XXIX

RIGHT THINKING AND PERSONALITY

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it

may be called.

--JOHN STUART MILL, _On Liberty_.

Right thinking fits for complete living by developing the power

to appreciate the beautiful in nature and art, power to think

the true and to will the good, power to live the life of

thought, and faith, and hope, and love.

--N.C. SCHAEFFER, _Thinking and Learning to Think_.

The speaker's most valuable possession is personality--that indefinable,

imponderable something which sums up what we are, and makes us different

from others; that distinctive force of self which operates appreciably

on those whose lives we touch. It is personality alone that makes us

long for higher things. Rob us of our sense of individual life, with its

gains and losses, its duties and joys, and we grovel. "Few human

creatures," says John Stuart Mill, "would consent to be changed into any

of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's

pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no

instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and

conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded

that the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his

lot than they with theirs.... It is better to be a human being

dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied

than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different

opinion, it is only because they know only their own side of the

question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."

Now it is precisely because the Socrates type of person lives on the

plan of right thinking and restrained feeling and willing that he

prefers his state to that of the animal. All that a man is, all his

happiness, his sorrow, his achievements, his failures, his magnetism,

his weakness, all are in an amazingly large measure the direct results

of his thinking. Thought and heart combine to produce _right_ thinking:

"As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." As he does not think in his

heart so he can never become.

Since this is true, personality can be developed and its latent powers

brought out by careful cultivation. We have long since ceased to believe

that we are living in a realm of chance. So clear and exact are nature's

laws that we forecast, scores of years in advance, the appearance of a

certain comet and foretell to the minute an eclipse of the Sun. And we

understand this law of cause and effect in all our material realms. We

do not plant potatoes and expect to pluck hyacinths. The law is

universal: it applies to our mental powers, to morality, to personality,

quite as much as to the heavenly bodies and the grain of the fields.

"Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," and nothing else.

Character has always been regarded as one of the chief factors of the

speaker's power. Cato defined the orator as _vir bonus dicendi

peritus_--a good man skilled in speaking. Phillips Brooks says: "Nobody

can truly stand as a utterer before the world, unless he be profoundly

living and earnestly thinking." "Character," says Emerson, "is a

natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with it.

The reason why we feel one man's presence, and do not feel another's is

as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being: justice is the

application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale,

according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure

runs down into other natures, as water runs down from a higher into a

lower vessel. This natural force is no more to be withstood than any

other natural force.... Character is nature in the highest form."

It is absolutely impossible for impure, bestial and selfish thoughts to

blossom into loving and altruistic habits. Thistle seeds bring forth

only the thistle. Contrariwise, it is entirely impossible for continual

altruistic, sympathetic, and serviceful thoughts to bring forth a low

and vicious character. Either thoughts or feelings precede and determine

all our actions. Actions develop into habits, habits constitute

character, and character determines destiny. Therefore to guard our

thoughts and control our feelings is to shape our destinies. The

syllogism is complete, and old as it is it is still true.

Since "character is nature in the highest form," the development of

character must proceed on natural lines. The garden left to itself will

bring forth weeds and scrawny plants, but the flower-beds nurtured

carefully will blossom into fragrance and beauty.

As the student entering college largely determines his vocation by

choosing from the different courses of the curriculum, so do we choose

our characters by choosing our thoughts. We are steadily going up

toward that which we most wish for, or steadily sinking to the level of

our low desires. What we secretly cherish in our hearts is a symbol of

what we shall receive. Our trains of thoughts are hurrying us on to our

destiny. When you see the flag fluttering to the South, you know the

wind is coming from the North. When you see the straws and papers being

carried to the Northward you realize the wind is blowing out of the

South. It is just as easy to ascertain a man's thoughts by observing the

tendency of his character.

Let it not be suspected for one moment that all this is merely a

preachment on the question of morals. It is that, but much more, for it

touches the whole man--his imaginative nature, his ability to control

his feelings, the mastery of his thinking faculties, and--perhaps most

largely--his power to will and to carry his volitions into effective

action.

Right thinking constantly assumes that the will sits enthroned to

execute the dictates of mind, conscience and heart. _Never tolerate for

an instant the suggestion that your will is not absolutely efficient._

The way to will is to will--and the very first time you are tempted to

break a worthy resolution--and you will be, you may be certain of

that--_make your fight then and there_. You cannot afford to lose that

fight. You _must_ win it--don't swerve for an instant, but keep that

resolution if it kills you. It will not, but you must fight just as

though life depended on the victory; and indeed your personality may

actually lie in the balances!

Your success or failure as a speaker will be determined very largely by

your thoughts and your mental attitude. The present writer had a student

of limited education enter one of his classes in public speaking. He

proved to be a very poor speaker; and the instructor could

conscientiously do little but point out faults. However, the young man

was warned not to be discouraged. With sorrow in his voice and the

essence of earnestness beaming from his eyes, he replied: "I will not be

discouraged! I want so badly to know how to speak!" It was warm, human,

and from the very heart. And he did keep on trying--and developed into a

creditable speaker.

There is no power under the stars that can defeat a man with that

attitude. He who down in the deeps of his heart earnestly longs to get

facility in speaking, and is willing to make the sacrifices necessary,

will reach his goal. "Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find;

knock and it shall be opened unto you," is indeed applicable to those

who would acquire speech-power. You will not realize the prize that you

wish for languidly, but the goal that you start out to attain with the

spirit of the old guard that dies but never surrenders, you will surely

reach.

Your belief in your ability and your willingness to make sacrifices for

that belief, are the double index to your future achievements. Lincoln

had a dream of his possibilities as a speaker. He transmuted that dream

into life solely because he walked many miles to borrow books which he

read by the log-fire glow at night. He sacrificed much to realize his

vision. Livingstone had a great faith in his ability to serve the

benighted races of Africa. To actualize that faith he gave up all.

Leaving England for the interior of the Dark Continent he struck the

death blow to Europe's profits from the slave trade. Joan of Arc had

great self-confidence, glorified by an infinite capacity for sacrifice.

She drove the English beyond the Loire, and stood beside Charles while

he was crowned.

These all realized their strongest desires. The law is universal. Desire

greatly, and you shall achieve; sacrifice much, and you shall obtain.

Stanton Davis Kirkham has beautifully expressed this thought: "You may

be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that

has for so long seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find

yourself before an audience--the pen still behind your ear, the ink

stains on your fingers--and then and there shall pour out the torrent of

your inspiration. You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the

city--bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance

of the spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall

say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the

master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep.

You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself the

regeneration of the world."

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What, in your own words, is personality?

2. How does personality in a speaker affect you as a listener?

3. In what ways does personality show itself in a speaker?

4. Deliver a short speech on "The Power of Will in the Public Speaker."

5. Deliver a short address based on any sentence you choose from this

chapter.

CHAPTER XXX

AFTER-DINNER AND OTHER OCCASIONAL SPEAKING

The perception of the ludicrous is a pledge of sanity.

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Essays_.

And let him be sure to leave other men their turns to speak.

--FRANCIS BACON, Essay on _Civil and Moral Discourse_.

Perhaps the most brilliant, and certainly the most entertaining, of all

speeches are those delivered on after-dinner and other special

occasions. The air of well-fed content in the former, and of expectancy

well primed in the latter, furnishes an audience which, though not

readily won, is prepared for the best, while the speaker himself is

pretty sure to have been chosen for his gifts of oratory.

The first essential of good occasional speaking is to study the

occasion. Precisely what is the object of the meeting? How important is

the occasion to the audience? How large will the audience be? What sort

of people are they? How large is the auditorium? Who selects the

speakers' themes? Who else is to speak? What are they to speak about?

Precisely how long am I to speak? Who speaks before I do and who

follows?

If you want to hit the nail on the head ask such questions as these.[35]

No occasional address can succeed unless it fits the occasion to a T.

Many prominent men have lost prestige because they were too careless or

too busy or too self-confident to respect the occasion and the audience

by learning the exact conditions under which they were to speak. Leaving

_too_ much to the moment is taking a long chance and generally means a

less effective speech, if not a failure.

Suitability is the big thing in an occasional speech. When Mark Twain

addressed the Army of the Tennessee in reunion at Chicago, in 1877, he

responded to the toast, "The Babies." Two things in that after-dinner

speech are remarkable: the bright introduction, by which he subtly

_claimed_ the interest of all, and the humorous use of military terms

throughout:

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: "The Babies." Now, that's something

like. We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we have

not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the

toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground--for

we've all been babies. It is a shame that for a thousand years

the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby, as if he

didn't amount to anything! If you, gentlemen, will stop and

think a minute--if you will go back fifty or a hundred years, to

your early married life, and recontemplate your first baby--you

will remember that he amounted to a good deal--and even

something over.

"As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not," said

Demosthenes, "so men are proved by their speeches whether they be wise

or foolish." Surely the occasional address furnishes a severe test of a

speaker's wisdom. To be trivial on a serious occasion, to be funereal at

a banquet, to be long-winded ever--these are the marks of non-sense.

Some imprudent souls seem to select the most friendly of after-dinner

occasions for the explosion of a bomb-shell of dispute. Around the

dinner table it is the custom of even political enemies to bury their

hatchets anywhere rather than in some convenient skull. It is the height

of bad taste to raise questions that in hours consecrated to good-will

can only irritate.

Occasional speeches offer good chances for humor, particularly the funny

story, for humor with a genuine point is not trivial. But do not spin a

whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and

threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be

funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable.

There is no way, short of sheer power of speech, that so surely leads to

the heart of an audience as rich, appropriate humor. The scattered

diners in a great banqueting hall, the after-dinner lethargy, the

anxiety over approaching last-train time, the over-full list of

over-full speakers--all throw out a challenge to the speaker to do his

best to win an interested hearing. And when success does come it is

usually due to a happy mixture of seriousness and humor, for humor alone

rarely scores so heavily as the two combined, while the utterly grave

speech _never_ does on such occasions.

If there is one place more than another where second-hand opinions and

platitudes are unwelcome it is in the after-dinner speech. Whether you

are toast-master or the last speaker to try to hold the waning crowd at

midnight, be as original as you can. How is it possible to summarize the

qualities that go to make up the good after-dinner speech, when we

remember the inimitable serious-drollery of Mark Twain, the sweet

southern eloquence of Henry W. Grady, the funereal gravity of the

humorous Charles Battell Loomis, the charm of Henry Van Dyke, the

geniality of F. Hopkinson Smith, and the all-round delightfulness of

Chauncey M. Depew? America is literally rich in such gladsome speakers,

who punctuate real sense with nonsense, and so make both effective.

Commemorative occasions, unveilings, commencements, dedications,

eulogies, and all the train of special public gatherings, offer rare

opportunities for the display of tact and good sense in handling

occasion, theme, and audience. When to be dignified and when colloquial,

when to soar and when to ramble arm in arm with your hearers, when to

flame and when to soothe, when to instruct and when to amuse--in a word,

the whole matter of APPROPRIATENESS must constantly be in mind lest you

write your speech on water.

Finally, remember the beatitude: Blessed is the man that maketh short

speeches, for he shall be invited to speak again.

SELECTIONS FOR STUDY

_LAST DAYS OF THE CONFEDERACY_

(Extract)

The Rapidan suggests another scene to which allusion has often

been made since the war, but which, as illustrative also of the

spirit of both armies, I may be permitted to recall in this

connection. In the mellow twilight of an April day the two

armies were holding their dress parades on the opposite hills

bordering the river. At the close of the parade a magnificent

brass band of the Union army played with great spirit the

patriotic airs, "Hail Columbia," and "Yankee Doodle." Whereupon

the Federal troops responded with a patriotic shout. The same

band then played the soul-stirring strains of "Dixie," to which

a mighty response came from ten thousand Southern troops. A few

moments later, when the stars had come out as witnesses and when

all nature was in harmony, there came from the same band the old

melody, "Home, Sweet Home." As its familiar and pathetic notes

rolled over the water and thrilled through the spirits of the

soldiers, the hills reverberated with a thundering response from

the united voices of both armies. What was there in this old,

old music, to so touch the chords of sympathy, so thrill the

spirits and cause the frames of brave men to tremble with

emotion? It was the thought of home. To thousands, doubtless, it

was the thought of that Eternal Home to which the next battle

might be the gateway. To thousands of others it was the thought

of their dear earthly homes, where loved ones at that twilight

hour were bowing round the family altar, and asking God's care

over the absent soldier boy.

--GENERAL J.B. GORDON, C.S.A.

_WELCOME TO KOSSUTH_

(Extract)

Let me ask you to imagine that the contest, in which the United

States asserted their independence of Great Britain, had been

unsuccessful; that our armies, through treason or a league of

tyrants against us, had been broken and scattered; that the

great men who led them, and who swayed our councils--our

Washington, our Franklin, and the venerable president of the

American Congress--had been driven forth as exiles. If there had

existed at that day, in any part of the civilized world, a

powerful Republic, with institutions resting on the same

foundations of liberty which our own countrymen sought to

establish, would there have been in that Republic any

hospitality too cordial, any sympathy too deep, any zeal for

their glorious but unfortunate cause, too fervent or too active

to be shown toward these illustrious fugitives? Gentlemen, the

case I have supposed is before you. The Washingtons, the

Franklins, the Hancocks of Hungary, driven out by a far worse

tyranny than was ever endured here, are wanderers in foreign

lands. Some of them have sought a refuge in our country--one

sits with this company our guest to-night--and we must measure

the duty we owe them by the same standard which we would have

had history apply, if our ancestors had met with a fate like

theirs.

--WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

_THE INFLUENCE OF UNIVERSITIES_

(Extract)

When the excitement of party warfare presses dangerously near

our national safeguards, I would have the intelligent

conservatism of our universities and colleges warn the

contestants in impressive tones against the perils of a breach

impossible to repair.

When popular discontent and passion are stimulated by the arts

of designing partisans to a pitch perilously near to class

hatred or sectional anger, I would have our universities and

colleges sound the alarm in the name of American brotherhood and

fraternal dependence.

When the attempt is made to delude the people into the belief

that their suffrages can change the operation of national laws,

I would have our universities and colleges proclaim that those

laws are inexorable and far removed from political control.

When selfish interest seeks undue private benefits through

governmental aid, and public places are claimed as rewards of

party service, I would have our universities and colleges

persuade the people to a relinquishment of the demand for party

spoils and exhort them to a disinterested and patriotic love of

their government, whose unperverted operation secures to every

citizen his just share of the safety and prosperity it holds in

store for all.

I would have the influence of these institutions on the side of

religion and morality. I would have those they send out among

the people not ashamed to acknowledge God, and to proclaim His

interposition in the affairs of men, enjoining such obedience to

His laws as makes manifest the path of national perpetuity and

prosperity

--GROVER CLEVELAND, delivered at the Princeton

Sesqui-Centennial, 1896.

_EULOGY OF GARFIELD_

(Extract)

Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause,

in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand

of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's

interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into

the visible presence of death--and he did not quail. Not alone

for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could

give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through

days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony, that was not

less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm

courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met

his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell--what brilliant, broken

plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong,

warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet

household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great

host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother,

wearing the full rich honors of her early toil and tears; the

wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys

not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young

daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest

companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a

father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing

power to meet all demand. Before him, desolation and great

darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were

thrilled with instant, profound and universal sympathy.

Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the centre of a

nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the

love and all the sympathy could not share with him his

suffering. He trod the wine press alone. With unfaltering front

he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life.

Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the

voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the Divine

decree.

--JAMES G. BLAINE, delivered at the memorial service held

by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

_EULOGY OF LEE_

(Extract)

At the bottom of all true heroism is unselfishness. Its crowning

expression is sacrifice. The world is suspicious of vaunted

heroes. But when the true hero has come, and we know that here

he is in verity, ah! how the hearts of men leap forth to greet

him! how worshipfully we welcome God's noblest work--the strong,

honest, fearless, upright man. In Robert Lee was such a hero

vouchsafed to us and to mankind, and whether we behold him

declining command of the federal army to fight the battles and

share the miseries of his own people; proclaiming on the heights

in front of Gettysburg that the fault of the disaster was his

own; leading charges in the crisis of combat; walking under the

yoke of conquest without a murmur of complaint; or refusing

fortune to come here and train the youth of his country in the

paths of duty,--he is ever the same meek, grand, self-sacrificing

spirit. Here he exhibited qualities not less worthy and heroic

than those displayed on the broad and open theater of

conflict, when the eyes of nations watched his every action.

Here in the calm repose of civil and domestic duties, and in

the trying routine of incessant tasks, he lived a life as high

as when, day by day, he marshalled and led his thin and

wasting lines, and slept by night upon the field that was to

be drenched again in blood upon the morrow. And now he has

vanished from us forever. And is this all that is left of

him--this handful of dust beneath the marble stone? No! the

ages answer as they rise from the gulfs of time, where lie the

wrecks of kingdoms and estates, holding up in their hands as

their only trophies, the names of those who have wrought for

man in the love and fear of God, and in love--unfearing for

their fellow-men. No! the present answers, bending by his

tomb. No! the future answers as the breath of the morning fans

its radiant brow, and its soul drinks in sweet inspirations

from the lovely life of Lee. No! methinks the very heavens

echo, as melt into their depths the words of reverent love

that voice the hearts of men to the tingling stars.

Come we then to-day in loyal love to sanctify our memories, to

purify our hopes, to make strong all good intent by communion

with the spirit of him who, being dead yet speaketh. Come,

child, in thy spotless innocence; come, woman, in thy purity;

come, youth, in thy prime; come, manhood, in thy strength; come,

age, in thy ripe wisdom; come, citizen; come, soldier; let us

strew the roses and lilies of June around his tomb, for he, like

them, exhaled in his life Nature's beneficence, and the grave

has consecrated that life and given it to us all; let us crown

his tomb with the oak, the emblem of his strength, and with the

laurel the emblem of his glory, and let these guns, whose voices

he knew of old, awake the echoes of the mountains, that nature

herself may join in his solemn requiem. Come, for here he rests,

and

On this green bank, by this fair stream,

We set to-day a votive stone,

That memory may his deeds redeem?

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

--JOHN WARWICK DANIEL, on the unveiling of Lee's statue at

Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, 1883.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Why should humor find a place in after-dinner speaking?

2. Briefly give your impressions of any notable after-dinner address

that you have heard.

3. Briefly outline an imaginary occasion of any sort and give three

subjects appropriate for addresses.

4. Deliver one such address, not to exceed ten minutes in length.

5. What proportion of emotional ideas do you find in the extracts given

in this chapter?

6. Humor was used in some of the foregoing addresses--in which others

would it have been inappropriate?

7. Prepare and deliver an after-dinner speech suited to one of the

following occasions, and be sure to use humor:

A lodge banquet.

A political party dinner.

A church men's club dinner.

A civic association banquet.

A banquet in honor of a celebrity.

A woman's club annual dinner.

A business men's association dinner.

A manufacturers' club dinner.

An alumni banquet.

An old home week barbecue.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: See also page 205.]

CHAPTER XXXI

MAKING CONVERSATION EFFECTIVE

In conversation avoid the extremes of forwardness and reserve.

--CATO.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

--EMERSON, _Essays: Circles_.

The father of W.E. Gladstone considered conversation to be both an art

and an accomplishment. Around the dinner table in his home some topic of

local or national interest, or some debated question, was constantly

being discussed. In this way a friendly rivalry for supremacy in

conversation arose among the family, and an incident observed in the

street, an idea gleaned from a book, a deduction from personal

experience, was carefully stored as material for the family exchange.

Thus his early years of practise in elegant conversation prepared the

younger Gladstone for his career as a leader and speaker.

There is a sense in which the ability to converse effectively is

efficient public speaking, for our conversation is often heard by many,

and occasionally decisions of great moment hinge upon the tone and

quality of what we say in private.

Indeed, conversation in the aggregate probably wields more power than

press and platform combined. Socrates taught his great truths, not from

public rostrums, but in personal converse. Men made pilgrimages to

Goethe's library and Coleridge's home to be charmed and instructed by

their speech, and the culture of many nations was immeasurably

influenced by the thoughts that streamed out from those rich

well-springs.

Most of the world-moving speeches are made in the course of

conversation. Conferences of diplomats, business-getting arguments,

decisions by boards of directors, considerations of corporate policy,

all of which influence the political, mercantile and economic maps of

the world, are usually the results of careful though informal

conversation, and the man whose opinions weigh in such crises is he who

has first carefully pondered the words of both antagonist and

protagonist.

However important it may be to attain self-control in light social

converse, or about the family table, it is undeniably vital to have

oneself perfectly in hand while taking part in a momentous conference.

Then the hints that we have given on poise, alertness, precision of

word, clearness of statement, and force of utterance, with respect to

public speech, are equally applicable to conversation.

The form of nervous egotism--for it is both--that suddenly ends in

flusters just when the vital words need to be uttered, is the sign of

coming defeat, for a conversation is often a contest. If you feel this

tendency embarrassing you, be sure to listen to Holmes's advice:

And when you stick on conversational burs,

Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful _urs_.

Here bring your will into action, for your trouble is a wandering

attention. You must _force_ your mind to persist along the chosen line

of conversation and resolutely refuse to be diverted by _any_ subject or

happening that may unexpectedly pop up to distract you. To fail here is

to lose effectiveness utterly.

Concentration is the keynote of conversational charm and efficiency. The

haphazard habit of expression that uses bird-shot when a bullet is

needed insures missing the game, for diplomacy of all sorts rests upon

the precise application of precise words, particularly--if one may

paraphrase Tallyrand--in those crises when language is no longer used to

conceal thought.

We may frequently gain new light on old subjects by looking at

word-derivations. Conversation signifies in the original a turn-about

exchange of ideas, yet most people seem to regard it as a monologue.

Bronson Alcott used to say that many could argue, but few converse.

The first thing to remember in conversation, then, is that

listening--respectful, sympathetic, alert listening--is not only due to

our fellow converser but due to ourselves. Many a reply loses its point

because the speaker is so much interested in what he is about to say

that it is really no reply at all but merely an irritating and

humiliating irrelevancy.

Self-expression is exhilarating. This explains the eternal impulse to

decorate totem poles and paint pictures, write poetry and expound

philosophy. One of the chief delights of conversation is the opportunity

it affords for self-expression. A good conversationalist who monopolizes

all the conversation, will be voted a bore because he denies others the

enjoyment of self-expression, while a mediocre talker who listens

interestedly may be considered a good conversationalist because he

permits his companions to please themselves through self-expression.

They are praised who please: they please who listen well.

The first step in remedying habits of confusion in manner, awkward

bearing, vagueness in thought, and lack of precision in utterance, is to

recognize your faults. If you are serenely unconscious of them, no

one--least of all yourself--can help you. But once diagnose your own

weaknesses, and you can overcome them by doing four things:

1. _WILL_ to overcome them, and keep on willing.

2. Hold yourself in hand by assuring yourself that you know precisely

what you ought to say. If you cannot do that, be quiet until you are

clear on this vital point.

3. Having thus assured yourself, cast out the fear of those who listen

to you--they are only human and will respect your words if you really

have something to say and say it briefly, simply, and clearly.

4. Have the courage to study the English language until you are master

of at least its simpler forms.

_Conversational Hints_

Choose some subject that will prove of general interest to the whole

group. Do not explain the mechanism of a gas engine at an afternoon tea

or the culture of hollyhocks at a stag party.

It is not considered good taste for a man to bare his arm in public and

show scars or deformities. It is equally bad form for him to flaunt his

own woes, or the deformity of some one else's character. The public

demands plays and stories that end happily. All the world is seeking

happiness. They cannot long be interested in your ills and troubles.

George Cohan made himself a millionaire before he was thirty by writing

cheerful plays. One of his rules is generally applicable to

conversation: "Always leave them laughing when you say good bye."

Dynamite the "I" out of your conversation. Not one man in nine hundred

and seven can talk about himself without being a bore. The man who can

perform that feat can achieve marvels without talking about himself, so

the eternal "I" is not permissible even in his talk.

If you habitually build your conversation around your own interests it

may prove very tiresome to your listener. He may be thinking of bird

dogs or dry fly fishing while you are discussing the fourth dimension,

or the merits of a cucumber lotion. The charming conversationalist is

prepared to talk in terms of his listener's interest. If his listener

spends his spare time investigating Guernsey cattle or agitating social

reforms, the discriminating conversationalist shapes his remarks

accordingly. Richard Washburn Child says he knows a man of mediocre

ability who can charm men much abler than himself when he discusses

electric lighting. This same man probably would bore, and be bored, if

he were forced to converse about music or Madagascar.

Avoid platitudes and hackneyed phrases. If you meet a friend from Keokuk

on State Street or on Pike's Peak, it is not necessary to observe: "How

small this world is after all!" This observation was doubtless made

prior to the formation of Pike's Peak. "This old world is getting better

every day." "Fanner's wives do not have to work as hard as formerly."

"It is not so much the high cost of living as the cost of high living."

Such observations as these excite about the same degree of admiration as

is drawn out by the appearance of a 1903-model touring car. If you have

nothing fresh or interesting you can always remain silent. How would you

like to read a newspaper that flashed out in bold headlines "Nice

Weather We Are Having," or daily gave columns to the same old material

you had been reading week after week?

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Give a short speech describing the conversational bore.

2. In a few words give your idea of a charming converser.

3. What qualities of the orator should _not_ be used in conversation.

4. Give a short humorous delineation of the conversational "oracle."

5. Give an account of your first day at observing conversation around

you.

6. Give an account of one day's effort to improve your own conversation.

7. Give a list of subjects you heard discussed during any recent period

you may select.

8. What is meant by "elastic touch" in conversation?

9. Make a list of "Bromides," as Gellett Burgess calls those threadbare

expressions which "bore us to extinction"--itself a Bromide.

10. What causes a phrase to become hackneyed?

11. Define the words, (_a_) trite; (_b_) solecism; (_c_) colloquialism;

(_d_) slang; (_e_) vulgarism; (_f_) neologism.

12. What constitutes pretentious talk?

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

FIFTY QUESTIONS FOR DEBATE

1. Has Labor Unionism justified its existence?

2. Should all church printing be brought out under the Union Label?

3. Is the Open Shop a benefit to the community?

4. Should arbitration of industrial disputes be made compulsory?

5. Is Profit-Sharing a solution of the wage problem?

6. Is a minimum wage law desirable?

7. Should the eight-hour day be made universal in America?

8. Should the state compensate those who sustain irreparable business

loss because of the enactment of laws prohibiting the manufacture and

sale of intoxicating drinks?

9. Should public utilities be owned by the municipality?

10. Should marginal trading in stocks be prohibited?

11. Should the national government establish a compulsory system of

old-age insurance by taxing the incomes of those to be benefited?

12. Would the triumph of socialistic principles result in deadening

personal ambition?

13. Is the Presidential System a better form of government for the

United States than the Parliamental System?

14. Should our legislation be shaped toward the gradual abandonment of

the protective tariff?

15. Should the government of the larger cities be vested solely in a

commission of not more than nine men elected by the voters at large?

16. Should national banks be permitted to issue, subject to tax and

government supervision, notes based on their general assets?

17. Should woman be given the ballot on the present basis of suffrage

for men?

18. Should the present basis of suffrage be restricted?

19. Is the hope of permanent world-peace a delusion?

20. Should the United States send a diplomatic representative to the

Vatican?

21. Should the Powers of the world substitute an international police

for national standing armies?

22. Should the United States maintain the Monroe Doctrine?

23. Should the Recall of Judges be adopted?

24. Should the Initiative and Referendum be adopted as a national

principle?

25. Is it desirable that the national government should own all

railroads operating in interstate territory?

26. Is it desirable that the national government should own interstate

telegraph and telephone systems?

27. Is the national prohibition of the liquor traffic an economic

necessity?

28. Should the United States army and navy be greatly strengthened?

29. Should the same standards of altruism obtain in the relations of

nations as in those of individuals?

30. Should our government be more highly centralized?

31. Should the United States continue its policy of opposing the

combination of railroads?

32. In case of personal injury to a workman arising out of his

employment, should his employer be liable for adequate compensation and

be forbidden to set up as a defence a plea of contributory negligence on

the part of the workman, or the negligence of a fellow workman?

33. Should all corporations doing an interstate business be required to

take out a Federal license?

34. Should the amount of property that can be transferred by inheritance

be limited by law?

35. Should equal compensation for equal labor, between women and men,

universally prevail?

36. Does equal suffrage tend to lessen the interest of woman in her

home?

37. Should the United States take advantage of the commercial and

industrial weakness of foreign nations, brought about by the war, by

trying to wrest from them their markets in Central and South America?

38. Should teachers of small children in the public schools be selected

from among mothers?

39. Should football be restricted to colleges, for the sake of physical

safety?

40. Should college students who receive compensation for playing summer

baseball be debarred from amateur standing?

41. Should daily school-hours and school vacations both be shortened?

42. Should home-study for pupils in grade schools be abolished and

longer school-hours substituted?

43. Should the honor system in examinations be adopted in public

high-schools?

44. Should all colleges adopt the self-government system for its

students?

45. Should colleges be classified by national law and supervision, and

uniform entrance and graduation requirements maintained by each college

in a particular class?

46. Should ministers be required to spend a term of years in some trade,

business, or profession, before becoming pastors?

47. Is the Y.M.C.A. losing its spiritual power?

48. Is the church losing its hold on thinking people?

49. Are the people of the United States more devoted to religion than

ever?

50. Does the reading of magazines contribute to intellectual

shallowness?

APPENDIX B

THIRTY THEMES FOR SPEECHES

With Source References for Material.

1. KINSHIP, A FOUNDATION STONE OF CIVILIZATION.

"The State," Woodrow Wilson.

2. INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM.

"The Popular Initiative and Referendum," O.M. Barnes.

3. RECIPROCITY WITH CANADA.

Article in _Independent_, 53: 2874; article in _North

American Review_, 178: 205.

4. IS MANKIND PROGRESSING?

Book of same title, M.M. Ballou.

5. MOSES THE PEERLESS LEADER.

Lecture by John Lord, in "Beacon Lights of History."

NOTE: This set of books contains a vast store of

material for speeches.

6. THE SPOILS SYSTEM.

Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke, reported

in the _New York Tribune_, February 25, 1895.

7. THE NEGRO IN BUSINESS.

Part III, Annual Report of the Secretary of Internal

Affairs, Pennsylvania, 1912.

8. IMMIGRATION AND DEGRADATION.

"Americans or Aliens?" Howard B. Grose.

9. WHAT IS THE THEATRE DOING FOR AMERICA?

"The Drama Today," Charlton Andrews.

10. SUPERSTITION.

"Curiosities of Popular Custom," William S. Walsh.

11. THE PROBLEM OF OLD AGE.

"Old Age Deferred," Arnold Lorand.

12. WHO IS THE TRAMP?

Article in _Century_, 28: 41.

13. TWO MEN INSIDE.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," R.L. Stevenson.

14. THE OVERTHROW OF POVERTY.

"The Panacea for Poverty," Madison Peters.

15. MORALS AND MANNERS.

"A Christian's Habits," Robert E. Speer.

16. JEW AND CHRISTIAN.

"Jesus the Jew," Harold Weinstock.

17. EDUCATION AND THE MOVING PICTURE.

Article by J. Berg Esenwein in "The Theatre of

Science," Robert Grau.

18. BOOKS AS FOOD.

"Books and Reading," R.C. Gage and Alfred

Harcourt.

19. WHAT IS A NOVEL?

"The Technique of the Novel," Charles F. Home.

20. MODERN FICTION AND MODERN LIFE.

Article in _Lippincott's_, October, 1907.

21. OUR PROBLEM IN MEXICO.

"The Real Mexico," Hamilton Fyfe.

22. THE JOY OF RECEIVING.

Article in _Woman's Home Companion_, December, 1914.

23. PHYSICAL TRAINING VS. COLLEGE ATHLETICS.

Article in _Literary Digest_, November 28, 1914.

24. CHEER UP.

"The Science of Happiness," Jean Finot.

25. THE SQUARE PEG IN THE ROUND HOLE.

"The Job, the Man, and the Boss," Katherine

Blackford and Arthur Newcomb.

26. THE DECAY OF ACTING.

Article in _Current Opinion_, November, 1914.

27. THE YOUNG MAN AND THE CHURCH.

"A Young man's Religion," N. McGee Waters.

28. INHERITING SUCCESS.

Article in _Current Opinion_, November, 1914.

29. THE INDIAN IN OKLAHOMA.

Article in _Literary Digest_, November 28, 1914.

30. HATE AND THE NATION.

Article in _Literary Digest_, November 14, 1914.

APPENDIX C

SUGGESTIVE SUBJECTS FOR SPEECHES[36]

With Occasional Hints on Treatment

1. MOVIES AND MORALS.

2. THE TRUTH ABOUT LYING.

The essence of truth-telling and lying. Lies that are not so

considered. The subtleties of distinctions required. Examples of

implied and acted lies.

3. BENEFITS THAT FOLLOW DISASTERS.

Benefits that have arisen out of floods, fires, earthquakes, wars,

etc.

4. HASTE FOR LEISURE.

How the speed mania is born of a vain desire to enjoy a leisure

that never comes or, on the contrary, how the seeming haste of

the world has given men shorter hours off labor and more time for

rest, study, and pleasure.

5. ST. PAUL'S MESSAGE TO NEW YORK.

Truths from the Epistles pertinent to the great cities of today.

6. EDUCATION AND CRIME.

7. LOSS IS THE MOTHER OF GAIN.

How many men have been content until, losing all, they exerted their

best efforts to regain success, and succeeded more largely than

before.

8. EGOISM vs. EGOTISM.

9. BLUNDERS OF YOUNG FOGYISM.

10. THE WASTE OF MIDDLE-MEN IN CHARITY SYSTEMS.

The cost of collecting funds for, and administering help to, the

needy. The weakness of organized philanthropy as compared with

the giving that gives itself.

11. THE ECONOMY OF ORGANIZED CHARITY.

The other side of the picture.

12. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.

The true forces that hurtfully control too many newspapers are not

those of arbitrary governments but the corrupting influences of

moneyed and political interests, fear of the liquor power, and the

desire to please sensation-loving readers.

13. HELEN KELLER: OPTIMIST.

14. BACK TO THE FARM.

A study of the reasons underlying the movement.

15. IT WAS EVER THUS.

In ridicule of the pessimist who is never surprised at seeing failure.

16. THE VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL.

Value of direct training compared with the policy of laying broader

foundations for later building. How the two theories work out in

practise. Each plan can be especially applied in cases that seem to

need special treatment.

17. ALL KINDS OF TURNING DONE HERE.

A humorous, yet serious, discussion of the flopping, wind-mill

character.

18. THE EGOISTIC ALTRUIST.

Herbert Spencer's theory as discussed in "The Data of Ethics."

19. HOW THE CITY MENACES THE NATION.

Economic perils in massed population. Show also the other side.

Signs of the problem's being solved.

20. THE ROBUST NOTE IN MODERN POETRY.

A comparison of the work of Galsworthy, Masefield and Kipling with

that of some earlier poets.

21. THE IDEALS OF SOCIALISM.

22. THE FUTURE OF THE SMALL CITY.

How men are coming to see the economic advantages of smaller

municipalities.

23. CENSORSHIP FOR THE THEATRE.

Its relation to morals and art. Its difficulties and its benefits.

24. FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS.

Mordecai's expression and its application to opportunities in modern

woman's life.

25. IS THE PRESS VENAL?

26. SAFETY FIRST.

27. MENES AND EXTREMES.

28. RUBICONS AND PONTOONS.

How great men not only made momentous decisions but created means

to carry them out. A speech full of historical examples.

29. ECONOMY A REVENUE.

30. THE PATRIOTISM OF PROTEST AGAINST POPULAR IDOLS.

31. SAVONAROLA, THE DIVINE OUTCAST.

32. THE TRUE POLITICIAN.

Revert to the original meaning of the word. Build the speech around

one man as the chief example.

33. COLONELS AND SHELLS.

Leadership and "cannon fodder"--a protest against war in its effect

on the common people.

34. WHY IS A MILITANT?

A dispassionate examination of the claims of the British militant

suffragette.

35. ART AND MORALS.

The difference between the nude and the naked in art.

36. CAN MY COUNTRY BE WRONG?

False patriotism and true, with examples of popularly-hated patriots.

37. GOVERNMENT BY PARTY.

An analysis of our present political system and the movement toward

reform.

38. THE EFFECTS OF FICTION ON HISTORY.

39. THE EFFECTS OF HISTORY ON FICTION.

40. THE INFLUENCE OF WAR ON LITERATURE.

41. CHINESE GORDON.

A eulogy.

42. TAXES AND HIGHER EDUCATION.

Should all men be compelled to contribute to the support of

universities and professional schools?

43. PRIZE CATTLE VS. PRIZE BABIES.

Is Eugenics a science? And is it practicable?

44. BENEVOLENT AUTOCRACY.

Is a strongly paternal government better for the masses than a much

larger freedom for the individual?

45. SECOND-HAND OPINIONS.

The tendency to swallow reviews instead of forming one's own views.

46. PARENTAGE OR POWER?

A study of which form of aristocracy must eventually prevail, that

of blood or that of talent.

47. THE BLESSING OF DISCONTENT.

Based on many examples of what has been accomplished by those who

have not "let well-enough alone."

48. "CORRUPT AND CONTENTED."

A study of the relation of the apathetic voter to vicious government.

49. THE MOLOCH OF CHILD-LABOR.

50. EVERY MAN HAS A RIGHT TO WORK.

51. CHARITY THAT FOSTERS PAUPERISM.

52. "NOT IN OUR STARS BUT IN OURSELVES."

Destiny _vs._ choice.

53. ENVIRONMENT _VS._ HEREDITY.

54. THE BRAVERY OF DOUBT.

Doubt not mere unbelief. True grounds for doubt. What doubt has led

to. Examples. The weakness of mere doubt. The attitude of the

wholesome doubter _versus_ that of the wholesale doubter.

55. THE SPIRIT OF MONTICELLO.

A message from the life of Thomas Jefferson.

56. NARROWNESS IN SPECIALISM.

The dangers of specializing without first possessing broad

knowledge. The eye too close to one object. Balance is a vital

prerequisite for specialization.

57. RESPONSIBILITY OF LABOR UNIONS TO THE LAW.

58. THE FUTURE OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE.

What conditions in the history, temperament and environment of our

Southern people indicate a bright literary future.

59. WOMAN THE HOPE OF IDEALISM IN AMERICA.

60. THE VALUE OF DEBATING CLUBS.

61. AN ARMY OF THIRTY MILLIONS.

In praise of the Sunday-school.

62. THE BABY.

How the ever-new baby holds mankind in unselfish courses and saves

us all from going lastingly wrong.

63. LO, THE POOR CAPITALIST.

His trials and problems.

64. HONEY AND STING.

A lesson from the bee.

65. UNGRATEFUL REPUBLICS.

Examples from history.

66. "EVERY MAN HAS HIS PRICE."

Horace Walpole's cynical remark is not true now, nor was it true

even in his own corrupt era. Of what sort are the men who cannot

be bought? Examples.

67. THE SCHOLAR IN DIPLOMACY.

Examples in American life.

68. LOCKS AND KEYS.

There is a key for every lock. No difficulty so great, no truth so

obscure, no problem so involved, but that there is a key to fit the

lock. The search for the right key, the struggle to adjust it, the

vigilance to retain it--these are some of the problems of success.

69. RIGHT MAKES MIGHT.

70. ROOMING WITH A GHOST.

Influence of the woman graduate of fifty years before on the college

girl who lives in the room once occupied by the distinguished

"old grad."

71. NO FACT IS A SINGLE FACT.

The importance of weighing facts relatively.

72. IS CLASSICAL EDUCATION DEAD TO RISE NO MORE?

73. INVECTIVE AGAINST NIETSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY.

74. WHY HAVE WE BOSSES?

A fair-minded examination of the uses and abuses of the political

"leader."

75. A PLEA FOR SETTLEMENT WORK.

76. CREDULITY VS. FAITH.

77. WHAT IS HUMOR?

78. USE AND ABUSE OF THE CARTOON.

79. THE PULPIT IN POLITICS.

80. ARE COLLEGES GROWING TOO LARGE?

81. THE DOOM OF ABSOLUTISM.

82. SHALL WOMAN HELP KEEP HOUSE FOR TOWN, CITY, STATE, AND NATION?

83. THE EDUCATIONAL TEST FOR SUFFRAGE.

84. THE PROPERTY TEST FOR SUFFRAGE.

85. THE MENACE OF THE PLUTOCRAT.

86. THE COST OF HIGH LIVING.

87. THE COST OF CONVENIENCES.

88. WASTE IN AMERICAN LIFE.

89. THE EFFECT OF THE PHOTOPLAY ON THE "LEGITIMATE" THEATRE.

90. ROOM FOR THE KICKER.

100. THE NEED FOR TRAINED DIPLOMATS.

101. THE SHADOW OF THE IRON CHANCELLOR.

102. THE TYRANNY OF THE CROWD.

103. IS OUR TRIAL BY JURY SATISFACTORY?

104. THE HIGH COST OF SECURING JUSTICE.

105. THE NEED FOR SPEEDIER COURT TRIALS.

106. TRIUMPHS OF THE AMERICAN ENGINEER.

107. GOETHALS AND GORGAS.

108. PUBLIC EDUCATION MAKES SERVICE TO THE PUBLIC A DUTY.

109. MAN OWES HIS LIFE TO THE COMMON GOOD.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: It must be remembered that the phrasing of the subject

will not necessarily serve for the title.]

APPENDIX D

SPEECHES FOR STUDY AND PRACTISE

_NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS_

BRAVE LITTLE BELGIUM

Delivered in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., October 18, 1914. Used by

permission.

Long ago Plato made a distinction between the occasions of war and the

causes of war. The occasions of war lie upon the surface, and are known

and read of all men, while the causes of war are embedded in racial

antagonisms, in political and economic controversies. Narrative

historians portray the occasions of war; philosophic historians, the

secret and hidden causes. Thus the spark of fire that falls is the

occasion of an explosion, but the cause of the havoc is the relation

between charcoal, niter and saltpeter. The occasion of the Civil War was

the firing upon Fort Sumter. The cause was the collision between the

ideals of the Union presented by Daniel Webster and the secession taught

by Calhoun. The occasion of the American Revolution was the Stamp Tax;

the cause was the conviction on the part of our forefathers that men who

had freedom in worship carried also the capacity for self-government.

The occasion of the French Revolution was the purchase of a diamond

necklace for Queen Marie Antoinette at a time when the treasury was

exhausted; the cause of the revolution was feudalism. Not otherwise, the

occasion of the great conflict that is now shaking our earth was the

assassination of an Austrian boy and girl, but the cause is embedded in

racial antagonisms and economic competition.

As for Russia, the cause of the war was her desire to obtain the

Bosphorus--and an open seaport, which is the prize offered for her

attack upon Germany. As for Austria, the cause of the war is her fear of

the growing power of the Balkan States, and the progressive slicing away

of her territory. As for France, the cause of the war is the instinct of

self-preservation, that resists an invading host. As for Germany, the

cause is her deep-seated conviction that every country has a moral right

to the mouth of its greatest river; unable to compete with England, by

roundabout sea routes and a Kiel Canal, she wants to use the route that

nature digged for her through the mouth of the Rhine. As for England,

the motherland is fighting to recover her sense of security. During the

Napoleonic wars the second William Pitt explained the quadrupling of the

taxes, the increase of the navy, and the sending of an English army

against France, by the statement that justification of this proposed war

is the "Preservation of England's sense of security." Ten years ago

England lost her sense of security. Today she is not seeking to

preserve, but to recover, the lost sense of security. She proposes to do

this by destroying Germany's ironclads, demobilizing her army, wiping

out her forts, and the partition of her provinces. The occasions of the

war vary, with the color of the paper--"white" and "gray" and

"blue"--but the causes of this war are embedded in racial antagonisms

and economic and political differences.

WHY LITTLE BELGIUM HAS THE CENTER OF THE STAGE

Tonight our study concerns little Belgium, her people, and their part in

this conflict. Be the reasons what they may, this little land stands in

the center of the stage and holds the limelight. Once more David, armed

with a sling, has gone up against ten Goliaths. It is an amazing

spectacle, this, one of the smallest of the States, battling with the

largest of the giants! Belgium has a standing army of 42,000 men, and

Germany, with three reserves, perhaps 7,000,000 or 8,000,000. Without

waiting for any assistance, this little Belgium band went up against

2,000,000. It is as if a honey bee had decided to attack an eagle come

to loot its honeycomb. It is as if an antelope had turned against a

lion. Belgium has but 11,000 square miles of land, less than the States

of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Her population is

7,500,000, less than the single State of New York. You could put

twenty-two Belgiums in our single State of Texas. Much of her soil is

thin; her handicaps are heavy, but the industry of her people has turned

the whole land into one vast flower and vegetable garden. The soil of

Minnesota and the Dakotas is new soil, and yet our farmers there average

but fifteen bushels of wheat to the acre. Belgium's soil has been used

for centuries, but it averages thirty-seven bushels of wheat to the

acre. If we grow twenty-four bushels of barley on an acre of ground,

Belgium grows fifty; she produces 300 bushels of potatoes, where the

Maine farmer harvests 90 bushels. Belgium's average population per

square mile has risen to 645 people. If Americans practised intensive

farming; if the population of Texas were as dense as it is in

Belgium--100,000,000 of the United States, Canada and Central America

could all move to Texas, while if our entire country was as densely

populated as Belgium's, everybody in the world could live comfortably

within the limits of our country.

THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE

And yet, little Belgium has no gold or silver mines, and all the

treasures of copper and zinc and lead and anthracite and oil have been

denied her. The gold is in the heart of her people. No other land holds

a race more prudent, industrious and thrifty! It is a land where

everybody works. In the winter when the sun does not rise until half

past seven, the Belgian cottages have lights in their windows at five,

and the people are ready for an eleven-hour day. As a rule all children

work after 12 years of age. The exquisite pointed lace that has made

Belgium famous, is wrought by women who fulfill the tasks of the

household fulfilled by American women, and then begins their task upon

the exquisite laces that have sent their name and fame throughout the

world. Their wages are low, their work hard, but their life is so

peaceful and prosperous that few Belgians ever emigrate to foreign

countries. Of late they have made their education compulsory, their

schools free. It is doubtful whether any other country has made a

greater success of their system of transportation. You will pay 50 cents

to journey some twenty odd miles out to Roslyn, on our Long Island

railroad, but in Belgium a commuter journeys twenty miles in to the

factory and back again every night and makes the six double daily

journeys at an entire cost of 37-1/2 cents per week, less than the

amount that you pay for the journey one way for a like distance in this

country. Out of this has come Belgium's prosperity. She has the money to

buy goods from other countries, and she has the property to export to

foreign lands. Last year the United States, with its hundred millions of

people, imported less than $2,000,000,000, and exported $2,500,000,000.

If our people had been as prosperous per capita as Belgium, we would

have purchased from other countries $12,000,000,000 worth of goods and

exported $10,000,000,000.

So largely have we been dependent upon Belgium that many of the engines

used in digging the Panama Canal came from the Cockerill works that

produce two thousands of these engines every year in Liege. It is often

said that the Belgians have the best courts in existence. The Supreme

Court of Little Belgium has but one Justice. Without waiting for an

appeal, just as soon as a decision has been reached by a lower Court,

while the matters are still fresh in mind and all the witnesses and

facts readily obtainable, this Supreme Justice reviews all the

objections raised on either side and without a motion from anyone passes

on the decision of the inferior court. On the other hand, the lower

courts are open to an immediate settlement of disputes between the wage

earners, and newsboys and fishermen are almost daily seen going to the

judge for a decision regarding a dispute over five or ten cents. When

the judge has cross-questioned both sides, without the presence of

attorneys, or the necessity of serving a process, or raising a dollar

and a quarter, as here, the poorest of the poor have their wrongs

righted. It is said that not one decision out of one hundred is

appealed, thus calling for the existence of an attorney.

To all other institutions organized in the interest of the wage earner

has been added the national savings bank system, that makes loans to men

of small means, that enables the farmer and the working man to buy a

little garden and build a house, while at the same time insuring the

working man against accident and sickness. Belgium is a poor man's

country, it has been said, because institutions have been administered

in the interest of the men of small affairs.

THE GREAT BELGIUM PLAIN IN HISTORY

But the institutions of Belgium and the industrial prosperity of her

people alone are not equal to the explanation of her unique heroism.

Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Cæsar said that Gaul was inhabited

by three tribes, the Belgæ, the Aquitani, the Celts, "of whom the Belgæ

were the bravest." History will show that Belgians have courage as their

native right, for only the brave could have survived. The southeastern

part of Belgium is a series of rock plains, and if these plains have

been her good fortune in times of peace, they have furnished the

battlefields of Western Europe for two thousand years. Northern France

and Western Germany are rough, jagged and wooded, but the Belgian plains

were ideal battlefields. For this reason the generals of Germany and of

France have usually met and struggled for the mastery on these wide

Belgian plains. On one of these grounds Julius Cæsar won the first

battle that is recorded. Then came King Clovis and the French, with

their campaigns; toward these plains also the Saracens were hurrying

when assaulted by Charles Martel. On the Belgian plains the Dutch

burghers and the Spanish armies, led by Bloody Alva, fought out their

battle. Hither, too, came Napoleon, and the great mound of Waterloo is

the monument to the Duke of Wellington's victory. It was to the Belgian

plains, also, that the German general, last August, rushed his troops.

Every college and every city searches for some level spot of land where

the contest between opposing teams may be held, and for more than two

thousand years the Belgian plain has been the scene of the great battles

between the warring nations of Western Europe.

Now, out of all these collisions there has come a hardy race, inured to

peril, rich in fortitude, loyalty, patience, thrift, self-reliance and

persevering faith. For five hundred years the Belgian children and youth

have been brought up upon the deeds of noble renown, achieved by their

ancestors. If Julius Cæsar were here today he would wear Belgium's

bravery like a bright sword, girded to his thigh. And when this brave

little people, with a standing army of forty-two thousand men,

single-handed defied two millions of Germans, it tells us that Ajax has

come back once more to defy the god of lightnings.

A THRILLING CHAPTER FROM BELGIUM'S HISTORY

Perhaps one or two chapters torn from the pages of Belgium history will

enable us to understand her present-day heroism, just as one golden

bough plucked from the forest will explain the richness of the autumn.

You remember that Venice was once the financial center of the world.

Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put

their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of

the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and

twenty feet high. Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World

turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and

Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal. No captains

were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp. In 1568 there were

500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse. Belgium became a casket

filled with jewels. Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes

northward. Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and passion,

the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son,

King Philip. Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva,

with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition. Their

approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy

with commerce and not with war. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards

makes up a revolting page in history. Within three days 8,000 men, women

and children were massacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine

and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were. The

Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to

blackened ruins. One incident will make the event stand out. When the

Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his

son's marriage. During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of

the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man's house. When they

had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they

killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the

night. The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found

in the street, searching among the dead bodies. At last she found a

youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her

songs, as a young mother soothes her babe. A Spanish officer passing by,

humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put

the girl out of her misery.

THE HORRORS OF THE INQUISITION

Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set

up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a

strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations

have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruelty to the

Moors and the rich Jews forms one of the blackest chapters in history.

Inquisitors became fiends. Moors were starved, tortured, burned, flung

in wells, Jewish bankers had their tongues thrust through little iron

rings; then the end of the tongue was seared that it might swell, and

the banker was led by a string in the ring through the streets of the

city. The women and the children were put on rafts that were pushed out

into the Mediterranean Sea. When the swollen corpses drifted ashore, the

plague broke out, and when that black plague spread over Spain it seemed

like the justice of outraged nature. The expulsion of the Moors was one

of the deadliest blows ever struck at science, commerce, art and

literature. The historian tracks Spain across the continents by a trail

of blood. Wherever Spain's hand has fallen it has paralyzed. From the

days of Cortez, wherever her captains have given a pledge, the tongue

that spake has been mildewed with lies and treachery. The wildest beasts

are not in the jungle; man is the lion that rends, man is the leopard

that tears, man's hate is the serpent that poisons, and the Spaniard

entered Belgium to turn a garden into a wilderness. Within one year,

1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000.

Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many

thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers

and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno,

whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown

the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield

up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms,

she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the

merchant into the deadly embrace. As the iron arms concealed in velvet

folded together, one spike passed through each eye, another through the

mouth, another through the heart. The Painted Lady's lips were poisoned,

so that a kiss was fatal. The dungeon whose sides were forced together

by screws, so that each day the victim saw his cell growing less and

less, and knew that soon he would be crushed to death, was another

instrument of torture. Literally thousands of innocent men and women

were burned alive in the market place.

There is no more piteous tragedy in history than the story of the

decline and ruin of this superbly prosperous, literary and artistic

country, and yet out of the ashes came new courage. Burned, broken, the

Belgians and the Dutch were not beaten. Pushed at last into Holland,

where they united their fortunes with the Dutch, they cut the dykes of

Holland, and let in the ocean, and clinging to the dykes with their

finger tips, fought their way back to the land; but no sooner had the

last of the Spaniards gone than out of their rags and poverty they

founded a university as a monument to the providence of God in

delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. For, the Sixteenth

Century, in the form of a brave knight, wears little Belgium and Holland

like a red rose upon his heart.

THE DEATH OF EGMONT

But some of you will say that the Belgian people must have been rebels

and guilty of some excess, and that had they remained quiescent, and not

fomented treason, that no such fate could have overtaken them at the

hands of Spain. Very well. I will take a youth who, at the beginning,

believed in Charles the Fifth, a man who was as true to his ideals as

the needle to the pole. One day the "Bloody Council" decreed the death

of Egmont and Horn. Immediately afterward, the Duke of Alva sent an

invitation to Egmont to be the guest of honor at a banquet in his own

house. A servant from the palace that night delivered to the Count a

slip of paper, containing a warning to take the fleetest horse and flee

the city, and from that moment not to eat or sleep without pistols at

his hand. To all this Egmont responded that no monster ever lived who

could, with an invitation of hospitality, trick a patriot. Like a brave

man, the Count went to the Duke's palace. He found the guests assembled,

but when he had handed his hat and cloak to the servant, Alva gave a

sign, and from behind the curtains came Spanish musqueteers, who

demanded his sword. For instead of a banquet hall, the Count was taken

to a cellar, fitted up as a dungeon. Already Egmont had all but died for

his country. He had used his ships, his trade, his gold, for righting

the people's wrongs. He was a man of a large family--a wife and eleven

children--and people loved him as to idolatry. But Alva was inexorable.

He had made up his mind that the merchants and burghers had still much

hidden gold, and if he killed their bravest and best, terror would fall

upon all alike, and that the gold he needed would be forthcoming. That

all the people might witness the scene, he took his prisoners to

Brussels and decided to behead them in the public square. In the evening

Egmont received the notice that his head would be chopped off the next

day. A scaffold was erected in the public square. That evening he wrote

a letter that is a marvel of restraint.

"Sire--I have learned this evening the sentence which your majesty has

been pleased to pronounce upon me. Although I have never had a thought,

and believe myself never to have done a deed, which would tend to the

prejudice of your service, or to the detriment of true religion,

nevertheless I take patience to bear that which it has pleased the good

God to permit. Therefore, I pray your majesty to have compassion on my

poor wife, my children and my servants, having regard to my past

service. In which hope I now commend myself to the mercy of God. From

Brussels, ready to die, this 5th of June, 1568.

"LAMORAL D' EGMONT."

Thus died a man who did as much probably for Holland as John Eliot for

England, or Lafayette for France, or Samuel Adams for this young

republic.

THE WOE OF BELGIUM

And now out of all this glorious past comes the woe of Belgium.

Desolation has come like the whirlwind, and destruction like a tornado.

But ninety days ago and Belgium was a hive of industry, and in the

fields were heard the harvest songs. Suddenly, Germany struck Belgium.

The whole world has but one voice, "Belgium has innocent hands." She was

led like a lamb to the slaughter. When the lover of Germany is asked to

explain Germany's breaking of her solemn treaty upon the neutrality of

Belgium, the German stands dumb and speechless. Merchants honor their

written obligations. True citizens consider their word as good as their

bond; Germany gave treaty, and in the presence of God and the civilized

world, entered into a solemn covenant with Belgium. To the end of time,

the German must expect this taunt, "as worthless as a German treaty."

Scarcely less black the two or three known examples of cruelty wrought

upon nonresisting Belgians. In Brooklyn lives a Belgian woman. She

planned to return home in late July to visit a father who had suffered

paralysis, an aged mother and a sister who nursed both. When the Germans

decided to burn that village in Eastern Belgium, they did not wish to

burn alive this old and helpless man, so they bayonetted to death the

old man and woman, and the daughter that nursed them.

Let us judge not, that we be not judged. This is the one example of

atrocity that you and I might be able personally to prove. But every

loyal German in the country can make answer: "These soldiers were drunk

with wine and blood. Such an atrocity misrepresents Germany and her

soldiers. The breaking of Germany's treaty with Belgium represents the

dishonor of a military ring, and not the perfidy of 68,000,000 of

people. We ask that judgment be postponed until all the facts are in."

But, meanwhile, the man who loves his fellows, at midnight in his dreams

walks across the fields of broken Belgium. All through the night air

there comes the sob of Rachel, weeping for her children, because they

are not. In moods of bitterness, of doubt and despair the heart cries

out, "How could a just God permit such cruelty upon innocent Belgium?"

No man knows. "Clouds and darkness are round about God's throne." The

spirit of evil caused this war, but the Spirit of God may bring good out

of it, just as the summer can repair the ravages of winter. Meanwhile

the heart bleeds for Belgium. For Brussels, the third most beautiful

city in Europe! For Louvain, once rich with its libraries, cathedrals,

statues, paintings, missals, manuscripts--now a ruin. Alas! for the

ruined harvests and the smoking villages! Alas, for the Cathedral that

is a heap, and the library that is a ruin. Where the angel of happiness

was there stalk Famine and Death. Gone, the Land of Grotius! Perished

the paintings of Rubens! Ruined is Louvain. Where the wheat waved, now

the hillsides are billowy with graves. But let us believe that God

reigns. Perchance Belgium is slain like the Saviour, that militarism may

die like Satan. Without shedding of innocent blood there is no remission

of sins through tyranny and greed. There is no wine without the crushing

of the grapes from the tree of life. Soon Liberty, God's dear child,

will stand within the scene and comfort the desolate. Falling upon the

great world's altar stairs, in this hour when wisdom is ignorance, and

the strongest man clutches at dust and straw, let us believe with faith

victorious over tears, that some time God will gather broken-hearted

little Belgium into His arms and comfort her as a Father comforteth his

well-beloved child.

_HENRY WATTERSON_

THE NEW AMERICANISM

(Abridged)

Eight years ago tonight, there stood where I am standing now a young

Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the "significance" of his

presence here, and, in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall,

appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.

He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was

fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been

appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men,

and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the

dove from the ark.

Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr.

Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's

actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of

that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this

judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from

gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches

deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely

tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs this

nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and

mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled

from oppression. Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had

their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost

arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and

great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human

blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that

tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes

in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.

So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by

slaves--and called it freedom--from the men in bell-crowned hats, who

led _Hester Prynne_ to her shame--and called it religion--to that

Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and

truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal from the patriarchs of New

England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from

Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name

and by the rights of that common citizenship--of that common

origin--back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier--to which all of us

owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its

martyrs, not by its savage hatreds--darkened alike by kingcraft and

priestcraft--let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the

future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they

teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to

reveal. Blessed be Tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of God to

guide the way with loving word, as blessed be all that brings us nearer

the goal of true religion, true Republicanism, and true patriotism,

distrust of watchwords and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our

country and ourselves. It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf

Whittier, who cried:--

"Dear God and Father of us all,

Forgive our faith in cruel lies,

Forgive the blindness that denies.

"Cast down our idols--overturn

Our bloody altars--make us see

Thyself in Thy humanity!"

_JOHN MORLEY_

FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS

(Abridged)

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 3, 1904.

What is so hard as a just estimate of the events of our own time? It is

only now, a century and a half later, that we really perceive that a

writer has something to say for himself when he calls Wolfe's exploit at

Quebec the turning point in modern history. And to-day it is hard to

imagine any rational standard that would not make the American

Revolution--an insurrection of thirteen little colonies, with a

population of 3,000,000 scattered in a distant wilderness among

savages--a mightier event in many of its aspects than the volcanic

convulsion in France. Again, the upbuilding of your great West on this

continent is reckoned by some the most important world movement of the

last hundred years. But is it more important than the amazing, imposing

and perhaps disquieting apparition of Japan? One authority insists that

when Russia descended into the Far East and pushed her frontier on the

Pacific to the forty-third degree of latitude that was one of the most

far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of

Europe--all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant.

Who can say? Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take

the full historic measures of Luther, Calvin, Knox; the measure of

Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation. The

center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world

perpetually changing. But we are now far enough off to discern how

stupendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one

foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a

span of less than a score of years, planted the foundations of the

American Republic.

What Forbes's stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than

I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg in material production--iron, steel,

coke, glass, and all the rest of it--can only be told in colossal

figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures

of astronomical distance or geologic time. It is not quite clear that

all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful

scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would

have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in

the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said,

"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the

liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as

the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a

country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per cent.

of our population as dwellers in towns. With you, I read that only 25

per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons. If

Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark. Let us hope that he was

wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view.

Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.

That great man--a name in the forefront among the practical

intelligences of human history--once told a friend that when he dwelt

upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and

the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement

always begets another, he felt assured that the future progress of the

race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been. He was never

wearied of foretelling inventions yet to come, and he wished he could

revisit the earth at the end of a century to see how mankind was getting

on. With all my heart I share his wish. Of all the men who have built up

great States, I do believe there is not one whose alacrity of sound

sense and single-eyed beneficence of aim could be more safely trusted

than Franklin to draw light from the clouds and pierce the economic and

political confusions of our time. We can imagine the amazement and

complacency of that shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the

giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised

by the wondrous inventive faculties of man; if he could have foreseen

that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his

tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of

to-day--the largest electric plant in all the world on the site of Fort

Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of passengers carried

in the United States by electric motor power in a year; if he could have

realized all the rest of the magician's tale of our time.

Still more would he have been astounded and elated could he have

foreseen, beyond all advances in material production, the unbroken

strength of that political structure which he had so grand a share in

rearing. Into this very region where we are this afternoon, swept wave

after wave of immigration; English from Virginia flowed over the border,

bringing English traits, literature, habits of mind; Scots, or

Scots-Irish, originally from Ulster, flowed in from Central

Pennsylvania; Catholics from Southern Ireland; new hosts from Southern

and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of

every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is

only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and

incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements

into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an

achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither

Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the

Fifth nor Napoleon ever rivaled or approached.

We are usually apt to excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our

Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice,

survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, institution, all so

obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an

old world, with the open and disengaged ground of the new. Yet in fact

your difficulties were at least as formidable as those of the older

civilizations into whose fruitful heritage you have entered. Unique was

the necessity of this gigantic task of incorporation, the assimilation

of people of divers faiths and race. A second difficulty was more

formidable still--how to erect and work a powerful and wealthy State on

such a system as to combine the centralized concert of a federal system

with local independence, and to unite collective energy with the

encouragement of individual freedom.

This last difficulty that you have so successfully up to now surmounted,

at the present hour confronts the mother country and deeply perplexes

her statesmen. Liberty and union have been called the twin ideas of

America. So, too, they are the twin ideals of all responsible men in

Great Britain; altho responsible men differ among themselves as to the

safest path on which to travel toward the common goal, and tho the

dividing ocean, in other ways so much our friend, interposes, for our

case of an island State, or rather for a group of island States,

obstacles from which a continental State like yours is happily

altogether free.

Nobody believes that no difficulties remain. Some of them are obvious.

But the common-sense, the mixture of patience and determination that has

conquered risks and mischiefs in the past, may be trusted with the

future.

Strange and devious are the paths of history. Broad and shining channels

get mysteriously silted up. How many a time what seemed a glorious high

road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac. Think of

Canning's flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the

Spanish republics in South America--that he had called a new world into

existence to redress the balance of the old. This is one of the

sayings--of which sort many another might be found--that make the

fortune of a rhetorician, yet stand ill the wear and tear of time and

circumstance. The new world that Canning called into existence has so

far turned out a scene of singular disenchantment.

Tho not without glimpses on occasion of that heroism and courage and

even wisdom that are the attributes of man almost at the worst, the tale

has been too much a tale of anarchy and disaster, still leaving a host

of perplexities for statesmen both in America and Europe. It has left

also to students of a philosophic turn of mind one of the most

interesting of all the problems to be found in the whole field of

social, ecclesiastical, religious, and racial movement. Why is it that

we do not find in the south as we find in the north of this hemisphere a

powerful federation--a great Spanish-American people stretching from the

Rio Grande to Cape Horn? To answer that question would be to shed a

flood of light upon many deep historic forces in the Old World, of

which, after all, these movements of the New are but a prolongation and

more manifest extension.

What more imposing phenomenon does history present to us than the rise

of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth

century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war,

driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a

single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples,

Sicily, the Canaries; France humbled, England menaced, settlements made

in Asia and Northern Africa--Spain in America become possessed of a vast

continent and of more than one archipelago of splendid islands. Yet

before a century was over the sovereign majesty of Spain underwent a

huge declension, the territory under her sway was contracted, the

fabulous wealth of the mines of the New World had been wasted,

agriculture and industry were ruined, her commerce passed into the hands

of her rivals.

Let me digress one further moment. We have a very sensible habit in the

island whence I come, when our country misses fire, to say as little as

we can, and sink the thing in patriotic oblivion. It is rather startling

to recall that less than a century ago England twice sent a military

force to seize what is now Argentina. Pride of race and hostile creed

vehemently resisting, proved too much for us. The two expeditions ended

in failure, and nothing remains for the historian of to-day but to

wonder what a difference it might have made to the temperate region of

South America if the fortune of war had gone the other way, if the

region of the Plata had become British, and a large British immigration

had followed. Do not think me guilty of the heinous crime of forgetting

the Monroe Doctrine. That momentous declaration was not made for a good

many years after our Gen. Whitelocke was repulsed at Buenos Ayres, tho

Mr. Sumner and other people have always held that it was Canning who

really first started the Monroe Doctrine, when he invited the United

States to join him against European intervention in South American

affairs.

The day is at hand, we are told, when four-fifths of the human race will

trace their pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white

people in the United States trace their pedigree to-day. By the end of

this century, they say, such nations as France and Germany, assuming

that they stand apart from fresh consolidations, will only be able to

claim the same relative position in the political world as Holland and

Switzerland. These musings of the moon do not take us far. The important

thing, as we all know, is not the exact fraction of the human race that

will speak English. The important thing is that those who speak English,

whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and

never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock

for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind. In

this noble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that

claimants for the prize will be too large a multitude.

As an able scholar of your own has said, Jefferson was here using the

old vernacular of English aspirations after a free, manly, and

well-ordered political life--a vernacular rich in stately tradition and

noble phrase, to be found in a score of a thousand of champions in many

camps--in Buchanan, Milton, Hooker, Locke, Jeremy Taylor, Roger

Williams, and many another humbler but not less strenuous pioneer and

confessor of freedom. Ah, do not fail to count up, and count up often,

what a different world it would have been but for that island in the

distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time

went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new

in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity.

What is progress? It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics

in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define. If you want a

platitude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition. Or shall

we say that most definitions hang between platitude and paradox? There

are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of

religion. There must be about as many of poetry. There can hardly be

fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.

I am not bold enough to try a definition. I will not try to gauge how

far the advance of moral forces has kept pace with that extension of

material forces in the world of which this continent, conspicuous before

all others, bears such astounding evidence. This, of course, is the

question of questions, because as an illustrious English writer--to

whom, by the way, I owe my friendship with your founder many long years

ago--as Matthew Arnold said in America here, it is moral ideas that at

bottom decide the standing or falling of states and nations. Without

opening this vast discussion at large, many a sign of progress is beyond

mistake. The practise of associated action--one of the master keys of

progress--is a new force in a hundred fields, and with immeasurable

diversity of forms. There is less acquiescence in triumphant wrong.

Toleration in religion has been called the best fruit of the last four

centuries, and in spite of a few bigoted survivals, even in our United

Kingdom, and some savage outbreaks of hatred, half religious, half

racial, on the Continent of Europe, this glorious gain of time may now

be taken as secured. Perhaps of all the contributions of America to

human civilization this is greatest. The reign of force is not yet over,

and at intervals it has its triumphant hours, but reason, justice,

humanity fight with success their long and steady battle for a wider

sway.

Of all the points of social advance, in my country at least, during the

last generation none is more marked than the change in the position of

women, in respect of rights of property, of education, of access to new

callings. As for the improvement of material well-being, and its

diffusion among those whose labor is a prime factor in its creation, we

might grow sated with the jubilant monotony of its figures, if we did

not take good care to remember, in the excellent words of the President

of Harvard, that those gains, like the prosperous working of your

institutions and the principles by which they are sustained, are in

essence moral contributions, "being principles of reason, enterprise,

courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness,

timidity, and distrust." It is the moral impulses that matter. Where

they are safe, all is safe.

When this and the like is said, nobody supposes that the last word has

been spoken as to the condition of the people either in America or

Europe. Republicanism is not itself a panacea for economic difficulties.

Of self it can neither stifle nor appease the accents of social

discontent. So long as it has no root in surveyed envy, this discontent

itself is a token of progress.

What, cries the skeptic, what has become of all the hopes of the time

when France stood upon the top of golden hours? Do not let us fear the

challenge. Much has come of them. And over the old hopes time has

brought a stratum of new.

Liberalism is sometimes suspected of being cold to these new hopes, and

you may often hear it said that Liberalism is already superseded by

Socialism. That a change is passing over party names in Europe is plain,

but you may be sure that no change in name will extinguish these

principles of society which are rooted in the nature of things, and are

accredited by their success. Twice America has saved liberalism in Great

Britain. The War for Independence in the eighteenth century was the

defeat of usurping power no less in England than here. The War for Union

in the nineteenth century gave the decisive impulse to a critical

extension of suffrage, and an era of popular reform in the mother

country. Any miscarriage of democracy here reacts against progress in

Great Britain.

If you seek the real meaning of most modern disparagement of popular or

parliamentary government, it is no more than this, that no politics will

suffice of themselves to make a nation's soul. What could be more true?

Who says it will? But we may depend upon it that the soul will be best

kept alive in a nation where there is the highest proportion of those

who, in the phrase of an old worthy of the seventeenth century, think it

a part of a man's religion to see to it that his country be well

governed.

Democracy, they tell us, is afflicted by mediocrity and by sterility.

But has not democracy in my country, as in yours, shown before now that

it well knows how to choose rulers neither mediocre nor sterile; men

more than the equals in unselfishness, in rectitude, in clear sight, in

force, of any absolutist statesman, that ever in times past bore the

scepter? If I live a few months, or it may be even a few weeks longer, I

hope to have seen something of three elections--one in Canada, one in

the United Kingdom, and the other here. With us, in respect of

leadership, and apart from height of social prestige, the personage

corresponding to the president is, as you know, the prime minister. Our

general election this time, owing to personal accident of the passing

hour, may not determine quite exactly who shall be the prime minister,

but it will determine the party from which the prime minister shall be

taken. On normal occasions our election of a prime minister is as direct

and personal as yours, and in choosing a member of Parliament people

were really for a whole generation choosing whether Disraeli or

Gladstone or Salisbury should be head of the government.

The one central difference between your system and ours is that the

American president is in for a fixed time, whereas the British prime

minister depends upon the support of the House of Commons. If he loses

that, his power may not endure a twelvemonth; if on the other hand, he

keeps it, he may hold office for a dozen years. There are not many more

interesting or important questions in political discussion than the

question whether our cabinet government or your presidential system of

government is the better. This is not the place to argue it.

Between 1868 and now--a period of thirty-six years--we have had eight

ministries. This would give an average life of four and a half years. Of

these eight governments five lasted over five years. Broadly speaking,

then, our executive governments have lasted about the length of your

fixed term. As for ministers swept away by a gust of passion, I can only

recall the overthrow of Lord Palmerston in 1858 for being thought too

subservient to France. For my own part, I have always thought that by

its free play, its comparative fluidity, its rapid flexibility of

adaptation, our cabinet system has most to say for itself.

Whether democracy will make for peace, we all have yet to see. So far

democracy has done little in Europe to protect us against the turbid

whirlpools of a military age. When the evils of rival states,

antagonistic races, territorial claims, and all the other formulas of

international conflict are felt to be unbearable and the curse becomes

too great to be any longer borne, a school of teachers will perhaps

arise to pick up again the thread of the best writers and wisest rulers

on the eve of the revolution. Movement in this region of human things

has not all been progressive. If we survey the European courts from the

end of the Seven Years' War down to the French Revolution, we note the

marked growth of a distinctly international and pacific spirit. At no

era in the world's history can we find so many European statesmen after

peace and the good government of which peace is the best ally. That

sentiment came to violent end when Napoleon arose to scourge the world.

_ROBERT TOOMBS_

ON RESIGNING FROM THE SENATE, 1861

(Abridged)

The success of the Abolitionists and their allies, under the name of the

Republican party, has produced its logical results already. They have

for long years been sowing dragons' teeth and have finally got a crop of

armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved. That is an accomplished fact in

the path of this discussion that men may as well heed. One of your

confederates has already wisely, bravely, boldly confronted public

danger, and she is only ahead of many of her sisters because of her

greater facility for speedy action. The greater majority of those sister

States, under like circumstances, consider her cause as their cause; and

I charge you in their name to-day: "Touch not Saguntum."[37] It is not

only their cause, but it is a cause which receives the sympathy and will

receive the support of tens and hundreds of honest patriot men in the

nonslaveholding States, who have hitherto maintained constitutional

rights, and who respect their oaths, abide by compacts, and love

justice.

And while this Congress, this Senate, and this House of Representatives

are debating the constitutionality and the expediency of seceding from

the Union, and while the perfidious authors of this mischief are

showering down denunciations upon a large portion of the patriotic men

of this country, those brave men are coolly and calmly voting what you

call revolution--aye, sir, doing better than that: arming to defend it.

They appealed to the Constitution, they appealed to justice, they

appealed to fraternity, until the Constitution, justice, and fraternity

were no longer listened to in the legislative halls of their country,

and then, sir, they prepared for the arbitrament of the sword; and now

you see the glittering bayonet, and you hear the tramp of armed men from

your capitol to the Rio Grande. It is a sight that gladdens the eyes and

cheers the hearts of other millions ready to second them. Inasmuch, sir,

as I have labored earnestly, honestly, sincerely, with these men to

avert this necessity so long as I deemed it possible, and inasmuch as I

heartily approve their present conduct of resistance, I deem it my duty

to state their case to the Senate, to the country, and to the civilized

world.

Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government; they have

demanded no new Constitution. Look to their records at home and here

from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the

disruption of the empire, and they have not demanded a single thing

except that you shall abide by the Constitution of the United States;

that constitutional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be

done. Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all

its requirements, they have performed all its duties unselfishly,

uncalculatingly, disinterestedly, until a party sprang up in this

country which endangered their social system--a party which they

arraign, and which they charge before the American people and all

mankind with having made proclamation of outlawry against four thousand

millions of their property in the Territories of the United States; with

having put them under the ban of the empire in all the States in which

their institutions exist outside the protection of federal laws; with

having aided and abetted insurrection from within and invasion from

without with the view of subverting those institutions, and desolating

their homes and their firesides. For these causes they have taken up

arms.

I have stated that the discontented States of this Union have demanded

nothing but clear, distinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged

constitutional rights--rights affirmed by the highest judicial tribunals

of their country; rights older than the Constitution; rights which are

planted upon the immutable principles of natural justice; rights which

have been affirmed by the good and the wise of all countries, and of all

centuries. We demand no power to injure any man. We demand no right to

injure our confederate States. We demand no right to interfere with

their institutions, either by word or deed. We have no right to disturb

their peace, their tranquillity, their security. We have demanded of

them simply, solely--nothing else--to give us _equality, security and

tranquillity_. Give us these, and peace restores itself. Refuse them,

and take what you can get.

What do the rebels demand? First, "that the people of the United States

shall have an equal right to emigrate and settle in the present or any

future acquired Territories, with whatever property they may possess

(including slaves), and be securely protected in its peaceable enjoyment

until such Territory may be admitted as a State into the Union, with or

without slavery, as she may determine, on an equality with all existing

States." That is our Territorial demand. We have fought for this

Territory when blood was its price. We have paid for it when gold was

its price. We have not proposed to exclude you, tho you have contributed

very little of blood or money. I refer especially to New England. We

demand only to go into those Territories upon terms of equality with

you, as equals in this great Confederacy, to enjoy the common property

of the whole Union, and receive the protection of the common government,

until the Territory is capable of coming into the Union as a sovereign

State, when it may fix its own institutions to suit itself.

The second proposition is, "that property in slaves shall be entitled to

the same protection from the government of the United States, in all of

its departments, everywhere, which the Constitution confers the power

upon it to extend to any other property, provided nothing herein

contained shall be construed to limit or restrain the right now

belonging to every State to prohibit, abolish, or establish and protect

slavery within its limits." We demand of the common government to use

its granted powers to protect our property as well as yours. For this

protection we pay as much as you do. This very property is subject to

taxation. It has been taxed by you and sold by you for taxes.

The title to thousands and tens of thousands of slaves is derived from

the United States. We claim that the government, while the Constitution

recognizes our property for the purposes of taxation, shall give it the

same protection that it gives yours.

Ought it not to be so? You say no. Every one of you upon the committee

said no. Your senators say no. Your House of Representatives says no.

Throughout the length and breadth of your conspiracy against the

Constitution there is but one shout of no! This recognition of this

right is the price of my allegiance. Withhold it, and you do not get my

obedience. This is the philosophy of the armed men who have sprung up in

this country. Do you ask me to support a government that will tax my

property: that will plunder me; that will demand my blood, and will not

protect me? I would rather see the population of my native State laid

six feet beneath her sod than they should support for one hour such a

government. Protection is the price of obedience everywhere, in all

countries. It is the only thing that makes government respectable. Deny

it and you can not have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.

We demand, in the next place, "that persons committing crimes against

slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, shall be delivered

up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other

property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee

shall be the test of criminality." That is another one of the demands of

an extremist and a rebel.

But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts,

have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro and that negro

was a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition

of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent

and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each

of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we

submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead

letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the

State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the

governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was not

against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would

not comply with the demand. He made a similar refusal to Virginia. Yet

these are our confederates; these are our sister States! There is the

bargain; there is the compact. You have sworn to it. Both these

governors swore to it. The senator from New York swore to it. The

governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated. You can not bind

them by oaths. Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect

to whip freemen into loving such brethren! They will have a good time in

doing it!

It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried

out. The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says

so; the Constitution says so. The theft of slaves is a crime; they are

a subject-matter of felonious asportation. By the text and letter of the

Constitution you agreed to give them up. You have sworn to do it, and

you have broken your oaths. Of course, those who have done so look out

for pretexts. Nobody expected them to do otherwise. I do not think I

ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some

pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings,

hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement

of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an

extremist and a rebel.

The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under

the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, without being entitled

either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar

obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is

the Constitution:

"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws

thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law

or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,

but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such

service or labor may be due."

This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the

first forty years of your government. In 1793, in Washington's time, an

act was passed to carry out this provision. It was adopted unanimously

in the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in the House of

Representatives. Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the

Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it was plain. Not

only the federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States,

decided that this was a constitutional obligation. How is it now? The

North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural

character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives

were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State

to which they fled. They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves

were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they

were right, they know one another better than I do. You may charge a

white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not

require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to

determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled,

and then he is to be delivered up upon demand. White people are

delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves. Slaves, black

people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes

have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations.

Senators, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations

and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever

been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not

believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I

would have voted for it as a proposition _de novo_, yet I am bound to it

by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by

established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given

to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance, but

I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false

idea that anybody's blood was shed for it. I say that the Constitution

is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter

the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely

excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that "the powers not

granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to

the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people."

Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test. The

law of nature, the law of justice, would say--and it is so expounded by

the publicists--that equal rights in the common property shall be

enjoyed. Even in a monarchy the king can not prevent the subjects from

enjoying equality in the disposition of the public property. Even in a

despotic government this principle is recognized. It was the blood and

the money of the whole people (says the learned Grotius, and say all the

publicists) which acquired the public property, and therefore it is not

the property of the sovereign. This right of equality being, then,

according to justice and natural equity, a right belonging to all

States, when did we give it up? You say Congress has a right to pass

rules and regulations concerning the Territory and other property of the

United States. Very well. Does that exclude those whose blood and money

paid for it? Does "dispose of" mean to rob the rightful owners? You must

show a better title than that, or a better sword than we have.

What, then, will you take? You will take nothing but your own judgment;

that is, you will not only judge for yourselves, not only discard the

court, discard our construction, discard the practise of the government,

but you will drive us out, simply because you will it. Come and do it!

You have sapped the foundations of society; you have destroyed almost

all hope of peace. In a compact where there is no common arbiter, where

the parties finally decide for themselves, the sword alone at last

becomes the real, if not the constitutional, arbiter. Your party says

that you will not take the decision of the Supreme Court. You said so at

Chicago; you said so in committee; every man of you in both Houses says

so. What are you going to do? You say we shall submit to your

construction. We shall do it, if you can make us; but not otherwise, or

in any other manner. That is settled. You may call it secession, or you

may call it revolution; but there is a big fact standing before you,

ready to oppose you--that fact is, freemen with arms in their hands.

_THEODORE ROOSEVELT_

INAUGURAL ADDRESS

(1905)

MY FELLOW CITIZENS:--No people on earth have more cause to be thankful

than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in

our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good, Who has

blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large

a measure of well-being and happiness.

To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our

national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet

we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are

exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been

obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our

life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and

hardier virtues wither away.

Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed, and the

success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently

believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of

vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of all that life

has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is

ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a

mighty people can thrive best, alike as regard the things of the body

and the things of the soul.

Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from us.

We have duties to others and duties to ourselves--and we can shirk

neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its

greatness into relation to the other nations of the earth, and we must

behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.

Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of

cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words but

in our deeds that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will

by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of

all their rights.