COMPOSITION
Words make sentences, sentences form paragraphs, and paragraphs are
developed into speeches. Words should be vital and instantly spring
into position so that the thought may be quickly conveyed. They
should be appropriate in that they may become the time, place, and
circumstance in which they are used. They should not be employed for
their own sake, but merely for the reason that they fit in properly
with their fellows and adequately convey the speaker's meaning. Words
are important on account of their expressive power, and this is
greatly influenced by their location; as,
Many times the attempt was made to stretch the royal
authority far enough to justify military trials; but it
never had more than temporary success. --JEREMIAH S. BLACK
In this sentence the word "temporary" is important for the reason
that it qualifies the word "success," and the ability properly to
place words in a sentence so as to make them most effective in the
performance of their duty is as important to the speaker as is the
advantageous marshaling of an army to its general.
A sentence should contain one complete thought, and but one, and this
thought should be presented from only one point of view. By
remembering this, speakers will avoid confusing their listeners, as a
sentence containing one thought presented from one point is most
likely to be clear. The mind of the speaker grasps instantly such
sentences, sees all around them, as it were, and as quickly presents
them in the mind of the listener. Students of speech-making are
strongly advised to observe this rule of unity in constructing their
sentences.
Other essential qualities to the formation of good sentences are
force and ease. Force is best represented in short sentences, and
ease in long ones, although a sentence may, at times, lack ease
because it is too long. A sentence that is so involved that its
meaning is not instantly clear will lack in ease as well as in
clearness, and is sure to be deficient in force. When a speaker
wishes to employ force he should move from a weaker word to a
stronger; as, Byron, Milton, and Shakespeare are representative
English poets. When he wishes a sentence that is made up of a
negative and a positive to be forceful he should place the negative
first; as,
A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.
--RALPH WALDO EMERSON
When the object of the speaker is to be argumentative instead of
assertive he should place the positive first; as,
Territory, like other property, can only be acquired for
constitutional purposes, and cannot be acquired and
governed for unconstitutional purposes. --GEORGE F. HOAR
Sentences should be feeders, thus suggesting other sentences. They
should connect one with the other at both ends like links forming a
chain. The essential qualities of sentences are correctness, force,
ease, unity, and clearness.
As there should be perfect ease in going from word to word in a
sentence, so there should be like ease in going from sentence to
sentence in a paragraph. In fact, a paragraph is much like a large
sentence, the only real difference is that it is made of sentences
whereas a sentence is composed of words. A paragraph, like a
sentence, should be a unit, and one paragraph should grow out of
another exactly as sentences should do, and thus will the many
paragraphs form the speech in the same manner as do the words form
the sentences and the sentences form the paragraphs.
The four forms of English composition are exposition, argumentation,
narration, and description. Exposition teaches; argumentation
convinces and persuades; narration tells; description shows. In
oratory we have five classes: philosophic, demonstrative, forensic,
deliberative, and social, and the four forms of composition may be
employed in any of the five classes of oratory. Speakers, as a rule,
use the narrative for the statement; exposition, argumentation, or
description, for the body; and sometimes one form and sometimes
another for the conclusion. A speaker might adopt the narrative form
for stating his points, the argumentative for making them clear, and
the descriptive for driving them home.
EXPOSITION
Exposition means the interpreting of a passage or a work, explaining
and expounding its meaning, analyzing its parts, and laying bare to
the reader or listener all that might be obscure. A splendid example
of exposition is the following extract from _The American Scholar,_
by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be
covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well
spent in country labors; in town--in the insight into
trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men
and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering
in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and
embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any
speaker how much he has already lived through the poverty
or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the
quarry from whence we get tiles and cope-stones for the
masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field
and the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and
better than books, is, that it is a resource. That great
principle of undulation in nature, that shows itself in the
inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and
satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every
atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of
polarity--these "fits of easy transmission and reflection,"
as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they
are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the
other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when
the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer
apprehended, and books are a weariness--he has always the
resource _to live._ Character is higher than intellect.
Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The
stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong
to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or
medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this
elemental force of living them. This is a total act.
Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice
shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his
lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings
and passages of the day better than it can be measured by
any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that
the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he
unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from
influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in
strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education
have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to
destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandseled
savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come
at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said
of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen.
There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned
as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere
welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this
limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of
wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular
judgments and modes of action.
ARGUMENTATION
Argumentation means the stating of points or facts, the logical
presentation of them, and the drawing of conclusions from a
consideration of the premises. Its objects are to convince and
persuade the reader or listener. Argumentation that stops with
conviction is incomplete--it must persuade as well as convince in
order to be effective. A speaker accomplishes practically nothing if
he convinces an audience but does not persuade it to do the thing he
desires. Arguments may be direct or indirect. They are direct when
aimed at a stated conclusion, and they are indirect when they are
employed to disprove what is opposed to the speaker's contention. The
most effective form of argument is where the two forms, direct and
indirect, are employed, thus not only demolishing one contention but
clearly establishing the other. It is comparable to the contrast in
oratory where the statement is made that a certain thing is not only
not of a certain class but specifically belongs to another one. This
is "clinching" the argument, and it leaves not a loophole for the
escape of the opponent.
Here is an excellent piece of argumentative oratory, taken from an
address of William H. Seward in the celebrated Freeman case.
"Thou shalt not kill," is a commandment addressed, not to
him alone, but to me, to you, to the Court, and to the
whole community. There are no exceptions from that
commandment, at least not in civil life, save those of
self-defense, and capital punishment for crimes in the due
and just administration of the law. There is not only a
question, then, whether the prisoner has shed the blood of
his fellow-man, but the question whether we shall
unlawfully shed his blood. I should be guilty of murder if,
in my present relation, I saw the executioner waiting for
an insane man and failed to say, or failed to do in his
behalf, all that my ability allowed. I think it has been
proved of the prisoner at the bar, that during all this
long and tedious trial, he has had no sleepless nights, and
that even in the daytime, when he retires from the halls to
his lonely cell, he sinks to rest like a wearied child, on
the stone floor, and quietly slumbers till roused by the
constable with his staff, to appear again before the jury.
His counsel enjoy no such repose. Their thoughts by day and
their dreams by night are filled with oppressive
apprehension that, through their inability or neglect, he
may be condemned.
I am arraigned before you for undue manifestations of zeal
and excitement. My answer to all such charges shall be
brief. When this cause shall have been committed to you, I
shall be happy indeed if it shall appear that my only error
has been that I have felt too much, thought too intensely,
or acted too faithfully.
If my error would thus be criminal, how great would yours
be if you should render an unjust verdict? Only four months
have elapsed since an outraged people, distrustful of
judicial redress, doomed the prisoner to immediate death.
Some of you have confessed that you approved that lawless
sentence. All men now rejoice that the prisoner was saved
for this solemn trial. But this trial would be as criminal
as that precipitate sentence, if, through any wilful fault
or prejudice of yours, it should prove but a mockery of
justice. If any prejudice of witnesses, or the imagination
of counsel, or any ill-timed jest, shall, at any time, have
diverted your attention; or if any prejudgment which you
have brought into the jury box, or any cowardly fear of
popular opinion shall have operated to cause you to deny to
the prisoner that dispassionate consideration of his case
which the laws of God and man exact of you, and if, owing
to such an error, this wretched man fall from among the
living, what will be your crime? You have violated the
commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." It is not the form or
letter of the trial by jury that authorizes you to send
your fellow-man to his dread account, but it is the spirit
that sanctifies that glorious institution; and if, through
pride, passion, timidity, weakness, or any cause, you deny
the prisoner one iota of all the defense to which he is
entitled by the law of the land, you yourselves, whatever
his guilt may be, will have broken the commandment, "Thou
shalt do no murder."
NARRATION
Narration is recounting the particulars of events, or enumerating
facts; telling of occurrences or things in regular order.
Specifically, it is that part of explanation that allows the subject
in its relations to the movement of time. In simple words, it is a
continuous telling.
The narrative form of composition is beautifully employed by Daniel
Webster in his first Bunker Hill Monument address, the following
being an extract from that admirable speech:
The society whose organ I am was formed for the purpose of
rearing some honorable and durable monument to the memory
of the early friends of American independence. They have
thought that for this object no time could be more
propitious than the present prosperous and peaceful period;
that no place could claim preference over this memorable
spot; and that no day could be more auspicious to the
undertaking than the anniversary of the battle which was
here fought. The foundation of that monument we have now
laid. With solemnities suited to the occasion, with prayer
to Almighty God for His blessing, and in the midst of this
cloud of witnesses, we have begun the work. We trust it
will be prosecuted, and that, springing from a broad
foundation, rising high in massive solidity and unadorned
grandeur, it may remain as long as Heaven permits the works
of man to last, a fit emblem, both of the events in memory
of which it is raised, and of the gratitude of those who
have reared it.
DESCRIPTION
Description is showing of things by means of language-pictures;
telling the attributes that make up the whole. Word-pictures are
created by means of explaining the individual parts of a theme or
view as they affect the entire thing.
As a piece of word-picturing the following description of the
breaking of day, by Edward Everett, is certainly magnificent:
Much as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating
our conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present, even
to the unaided sight, scenes of glory which words are too
feeble to describe. I had occasion, a few weeks since, to
take the early train from Providence to Boston, and, for
this purpose, rose at two o'clock in the morning. Every
thing around was wrapped in darkness, and hushed in
silence, broken only by what seemed, at that hour, the
unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild,
serene, mid-summer's night; the sky was without a cloud;
the winds were hushed. The moon, then in the last quarter,
had just risen; and the stars shown with a spectral lustre
but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours
high, was the herald of the day: the Pleiades, just above
the horizon, shed their sweet influence in the east: Lyra
sparkled near the zenith: Andromeda veiled her newly
discovered glories from the naked eye, in the south: the
steady Pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up
from the depths of the north to their sovereign.
Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As
we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more
perceptible. The intense blue of the sky began to soften;
the smaller stars, like little children, went first to
rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted
together; but the bright constellations of the west and
north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous
transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from
mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the
glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn.
The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great
watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to
kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky;
the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing
tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from
above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we
reached the blue hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out
from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of
flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds
the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open,
and the Lord of Day, arrayed in glories too severe for gaze
of man, began his course.
EXAMPLES FOR PRACTICE
EXPOSITION
_The Conspiracy to Murder._ A conspiracy to kill and murder
does not owe its criminality to the length of time it may
occupy in its progress, from its first conception to its
ultimate adoption--a conspiracy may be formed the very
instant before the step is taken to put it into effect. If
a number of people meet accidentally in the street, and
conspire together to kill and murder at the moment, it is
as essentially the crime of conspiracy as if it had been
intended for a year before, and hatched from that year to
the moment of its accomplishment.
--JOHN P. CURRAN, _Trial of John Costly for
conspiracy to murder, Dublin,_ Feb. 23, 1804
_Circumstantial Evidence of Guilt._ I need not pause to
remind you how much caution, how much candor, and how much
intelligence are requisite in appreciating circumstantial
evidence in any case. That kind of evidence may clearly
prove guilt. That many times, however, it has also shed
innocent blood, and many times it has stained a fair name,
I need not pause for a moment to illustrate or remind you.
Instead of doing that, I think I shall be better occupied,
under the direction of his honor, in reminding you of the
two great rules by which circumstantial evidence is to be
weighed, appreciated, and applied by the jury. Those rules,
gentlemen, are these:
In the first place, that the jury shall be satisfied that
they conduct, as a necessary result and conclusion, to the
inference of guilt. It is a rule that may be called a
golden rule in the examination and application of this kind
of evidence which we call circumstantial, that should it so
turn out that every fact and circumstance alleged and
proved to exist is consistent, on the one hand with the
hypothesis of guilt and on the other hand consistent,
reasonably and fairly, with the hypothesis of innocence,
then those circumstances prove nothing at all. Unless they
go so far as to establish as a necessary conclusion this
guilt which they are offered with a view to establish, they
are utterly worthless and ineffectual for the investigation
of truth. I had the honor to read to the court this
morning, and possibly in your hearing, an authority in
which that familiar and elementary doctrine was laid down,
a doctrine every day applied, everywhere recognized as
primary in the appreciation of this kind of evidence. It is
not enough that the circumstances relied upon are plainly
and certainly proved. It is not enough to show that they
are consistent with the hypothesis of guilt. They must also
render the hypothesis of innocence inadmissible and
impossible, unreasonable and absurd, or they have proved
nothing at all.
--RUFUS CHOATE, _in the Dalton divorce case_
_Stare Decisis._ The people, in forming the organic law of
the government of this state, very wisely foresaw that, in
its action and progress, questions of interpretation of the
settlement of legal principles, and of their application,
would frequently arise; and thence the necessity of
constituting some tribunal with general appellate and
supervisory powers, whose decisions should be final and
conclusively settle and declare the law. This was supposed
to have been accomplished in the organization of this
court. Heretofore this court, under the Constitution, has
been looked to by the people as the tribunal of the last
resort in the state; and it has hitherto been supposed that
when this court has decided a case upon its merits such
decision not only determined the right of the parties
litigant in that particular case, but that it also settled
the principles involved in it as permanent rules of law,
universally applicable in all future cases embracing
similar facts, and involving the same or analogous
principles. These decisions thus became at once public law,
measures of private right, and landmarks of property. They
determined the right of persons and of things. Parties
entered into contracts with each other with reference to
them, as to the declared and established law; law equally
binding upon the courts and the people. But the doctrine
recently put forth would at once overturn this whole body
of law founded upon the adjudications of this court, built
up as it has been by the long continued and arduous labors,
grown venerable with years, and interwoven as it has become
with the interests, and habits, and the opinions of the
people. Under this new doctrine all would again be
unsettled--nothing established. Like the ever returning but
never ending labors of the fabled Sisyphus, this court, in
disregard to the maxim of "stare decisis," would, in each
recurring case, have to enter upon its examination and
decision as if all were new, without any aid from the
experience of the past, or the benefit of any established
principle or settled law. Each case with decision being
thus limited as law to itself alone would in turn pass away
and be forgotten, leaving behind it no record of principle
established, or light to guide, or rule to govern the
future.
--LUTHER BRADISH. _Opinion given as Presiding Judge
of Court of Errors, in Hanford v. Archer,_
Dec., 1842, _at Albany, N. Y._
ARGUMENTATION
_The Obligation of Contract._ We contend that the
obligation of a contract--that is, the duty of performing
it--is not created by the law of the particular place where
it is made, and dependent on that law for its existence;
but that it may subsist, and does subsist, without the law,
and independent of it. The obligation is in the contract
itself, in the assent of the parties, and in the sanction
of universal law. This is the doctrine of Grotius, Vattel,
Burlamaqui, Pothier, and Rutherford. The contract,
doubtless, is necessarily to be enforced by the municipal
law of the place where performance is demanded. The
municipal law acts on the contract after it is made, to
compel its execution, or give damages for its violation.
But this is a very different thing from the same law being
the original or fountain of the contract.
Let us illustrate this matter by an example. Two persons
contract together in New York for the delivery, by one to
the other, of a domestic animal, a utensil of husbandry, or
a weapon of war. This is a lawful contract, and, while the
parties remain in New York it is to be enforced by the laws
of that state. But, if they remove with the article to
Pennsylvania or Maryland, there a new law comes to act upon
the contract, and to apply other remedies if it be broken.
Thus far the remedies are furnished by the laws of society.
But suppose the same parties to go together to a savage
wilderness, or a desert island beyond the reach of the laws
of any society. The obligation of the contract still
subsists, and is as perfect as ever, and is now to be
enforced by another law, that is the law of nature; and the
party to whom the promise was made has a right to take by
force the animal, the utensil, or the weapon that was
promised him. The right is as perfect here as it was in
Pennsylvania, or even in New York.
--DANIEL WEBSTER, _in Ogden v. Saunders_
_Parent and Child._ The next greatest tie is that of parent
and child. If in God's providence a man has not only
watched over the cradle of his child, but over the grave of
his offspring, and has witnessed earth committed to earth,
ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, he knows that the love of
a parent for his child is stronger than death. The bitter
lamentation, "Would to God I had died for thee," has been
wrung from many a parent's heart. But when the adulterer's
shadow comes between the parent and child, it casts over
both a gloom darker than the grave. What agony is equal to
his who knows not whether the children gathered around his
board are his own offspring or an adulterous brood, hatched
in his bed. To the child it is still more disastrous.
Nature designs that children shall have the care of both
parents; the mother's care is the chief blessing to her
child--a mother's honor its priceless inheritance. But when
the adulterer enters a family, the child is deprived of the
care of one parent, perhaps of both. When death, in God's
providence, strikes a mother from the family, the deepest
grief that preys upon a husband's heart is the loss of her
nurture and example to his orphan child; and the sweetest
conversation between parent and child is when they talk of
the beloved mother who is gone. But how can a daughter hear
that mother's name without a blush? Death is merciful to
the pitiless cruelty of him whose lust has stained the fair
brow of innocent childhood by corrupting the heart of the
mother, whose example must stain the daughter's life.
--EDWIN M. STANTON, _in Sickles' trial_
_Distrust of Witnesses._ Are they witnesses to be trusted
with report of evidence by words? Are they witnesses to
remember words where everything may depend upon the exact
expression, upon the order of the language, upon dropping
an epithet here and inserting an epithet there, by which
the guilt of adultery is confessed? Is this a body of
witnesses that are to be trusted to report words, that are
the issues of life, with certainty and accuracy? I submit
that, on the outside of it, the whole case of confession to
be listened to by this jury is a conclusive and rational
distrust which would leave my client in no fear at all of
the result. Here is a man that cannot be trusted to carry
ten bushels of yellow, flat corn across the city for fear
that he would steal half of it; who cannot be trusted to
take a hat full of uncounted bills to New York. A man who
has not honesty enough, or fairness enough, to weight the
hind quarter of an ox--shall he be trusted to weigh out
gold dust and dimes, and count the pulses of life? A man
not honest enough, a combination not honest enough, to
carry a letter without mutilating it into a falsehood, to
prove words in which honesty, intelligence, and fairness
may be entirely omitted. We come, then, to this examination
of confession exactly in this state of the case: It is
probability, amounting almost to a miracle, that a
confession should be made under any circumstances at all.
Confessions themselves are never to be acted upon by the
jury unless they know, upon their oaths, that they have the
very words spoken in the sense in which they came. They
never can have that assurance if they have not a clear and
undoubting confidence in the speaker that reports them. And
their case opens, I say, with this: that a moral miracle is
to be established on the testimony of confessions, by the
evidence of witnesses, as a body, manifestly and apparently
undeserving a moment's confidence.
--RUFUS CHOATE, _in Dalton divorce case_
NARRATION
_The History of Trial by Jury._ I might begin with Tacitus,
and show how the contest arose in the forest of Germany
more than two thousand years ago; how the rough virtues and
sound common sense of that people established the right of
trial by jury, and thus started on a career which has made
their posterity the foremost race that ever lived in all
the tide of time. The Saxons carried it to England, and
were ever ready to defend it with their blood. It was
crushed out by the Danish invasion; and all that they
suffered of tyranny and oppression during the period of
their subjugation resulted from the want of trial by jury.
If that had been conceded to them the reaction would not
have taken place which drove back the Danes to their frozen
homes in the north. But those ruffian sea-kings could not
understand that, and the reaction came. Alfred, the
greatest of revolutionary heroes and the wisest monarch
that ever sat on a throne, made the first use of his power,
after the Saxons restored it, to reëstablish their ancient
laws. He had promised them that he would, and he was true
to them because they had been true to him. But it was not
easily done; the courts were opposed to it, for it limited
their power--a kind of power that everybody covets--the
power to punish without regard to law. He was obliged to
hang forty-four judges in one year for refusing to give his
subjects a trial by jury. When the historian says he hung
them, it is not meant that he put them to death without a
trial. He had them impeached before the grand council of
the nation, the Witenagemot, the parliament of that time.
During the subsequent period of Saxon domination no man on
English soil was powerful enough to refuse a legal trial to
the meanest peasant. If any minister or any king, in war or
in peace, had dared to punish a freeman by tribunal of his
own appointment, he would have roused the wrath of the
whole population; all orders of society would have resisted
it; lord and vassal, knight and squire, priest and
penitent, bocman and socman, master and thrall, copyholder
and villein, would have risen in one mass and burnt the
offender to death in his castle, or followed him in his
flight and torn him to atoms. It was again trampled down by
the Norman conquerors; but the evils resulting from the
want of it united all classes in the effort which compelled
King John to restore it by the Great Charter. Everybody is
familiar with the struggles which the English people,
during many generations, made for their rights with the
Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts, and which ended
finally in the revolution of 1688, when the liberties of
England were placed upon an impregnable basis by the Bill
of Rights. Many times the attempt was made to stretch the
royal authority far enough to justify military trials; but
it never had more than temporary success.
--JUDGE JEREMIAH S. BLACK,_in the Milligan case,
U. S. Supreme Court, Washington, D. C.,_ Dec., 1866
_Testimony._ I will go through the case fairly and discuss
it fully. I will nothing extenuate, nor aught set down in
malice. I will base my argument upon the testimony, not as
I would have it, but as it is. I will speak not to the
world, but to you, who can correct and hold me in judgment,
if I fail to redeem the promises of fairness and candor
which I make. Heaven can witness for me that I desire no
fame at the expense of these unfortunate men. I will use no
bitter words, I will affect no bitter loathing; I will
assail neither man, woman, nor child, except under the
urgent pressure of duty and necessity. I wish I could be
spared the painful task of doing so at all.
--J. A. VAN DYKE, _in conspiracy case,
Detroit, Mich.,_ Sept., 1851
DESCRIPTION
_Conscience._ Lady Macbeth must needs walk by night in her
sleep and rub her hands as if to wash them, and cry out:
"Out, damned spot, out I say!" But all Neptune's ocean will
not wash the stain away; all the perfumes of Arabia will
not sweeten the murderer's hand. Conscience, the greatest
gift of God, the child itself of God, working and acting
obedient to the same law by which your system and mine, by
their nature, will attempt to throw off disease, that which
is imperfect and that which is poison, I say by that same
law conscience seeks to throw off its load of guilt.
--STATE'S ATTORNEY FRANK M. NYE, _in People v.
Hayward, Minneapolis, Minn.,_ Dec., 1895
_Consent Under Protest._ Sir, the consent of Maine to part
with her soil and her sovereignty was given with a bleeding
heart; it was like the consent of him who bares his own
right arm to the surgeon's knife when advised that his life
can only be preserved by its amputation; she consented as
one consents to commit to kindred dust the children of his
body; she consented as the red man consents to be driven
from his happy hunting grounds, the graves of his fathers
and the banks of the streams where he sported in childhood;
she consented, as was said by another, as "the victim
consents to execution because he walks and is not dragged
to the scaffold which has been erected to receive him."
--DANIEL S. DICKINSON, _Speech in reply to Webster
on the Northwestern Boundary question,
U. S. Senate_, April 9, 1846
_Duties of Juries._ Gentlemen of the jury, I have about
concluded my duties in this case. Yours will follow. I ask
from you nothing in the world but the intelligent judgment
of twelve intelligent men on the evidence before you. I
have only one little picture more to offer. It is Burns's
picture of the Scottish farmer in the seclusion of his
family. His day's work done, he draws his little family
about him. He has laid aside his cap and has taken the old
family Bible from its shelf. He calls Jane and James and
the old mother and reads to them from God's promises. Then
all bow their heads in prayer. "In scenes like these old
Scotia's grandeur lies." Some of you here are wont to keep
that sacred tryst. Into that tryst you would never admit
this paper. --GENERAL BLACK, _in People v. Dunlap,
New York,_ Feb. 4, 1896