A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Public Speaking

I >> Irvah Lester Winter >> Public Speaking




Stop the news! Already the village church bells were beginning to ring
the alarm, as the pulpits beneath them had been ringing for many a
year. In the awakening houses lights flashed from window to window.
Drums beat faintly far away and on every side. Signal guns flashed and
echoed. The watchdogs barked; the cocks crew.

Stop the news! Stop the sunrise! The murmuring night trembled with the
summons so earnestly expected, so dreaded, so desired. And as, long
ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian shore, wailing
that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels
whispered, "Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born," so, if
the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal
heart to portend the passing glory of British dominion and the tragical
chance of war, it whispered to them with prophetic inspiration, "Good
will to men; America is born!"

There is a tradition that long before the troops reached Lexington an
unknown horseman thundered at the door of Captain Joseph Robbins in
Acton, waking every man and woman and babe in the cradle, shouting that
the regulars were marching to Concord and that the rendezvous was the
old North Bridge. Captain Robbins' son, a boy of ten years, heard the
summons in the garret where he lay, and in a few minutes was on his
father's old mare, a young Paul Revere, galloping along the road to
rouse Captain Isaac Davis, who commanded the minutemen of Acton. The
company assembled at his shop, formed, and marched a little way, when
he halted them and returned for a moment to his house. He said to his
wife, "Take good care of the children," kissed her, turned to his men,
gave the order to march, and saw his home no more. Such was the history
of that night in how many homes!

The hearts of those men and women of Middlesex might break, but they
could not waver. They had counted the cost. They knew what and whom
they served; and, as the midnight summons came, they started up and
answered, "Here am I!"


THE ARTS OF THE ANCIENTS

From "Speeches and Lectures," with the permission of Lothrop, Lee and
Shepard, Boston, publishers.

BY WENDELL PHILLIPS

We have a pitying estimate, a tender compassion, for the narrowness,
ignorance, and darkness of the bygone ages. We seem to ourselves not
only to monopolize, but to have begun, the era of light. In other
words, we are all running over with a fourth-day-of-July spirit of
self-content. I am often reminded of the German whom the English poet
Coleridge met at Frankfort. He always took off his hat with profound
respect when he ventured to speak of himself. It seems to me, the
American people might be painted in the chronic attitude of taking off
its hat to itself.

Considering their employment of the mechanical forces, and their
movement of large masses from the earth, we know that the Egyptians had
the five, seven, or three mechanical powers; but we cannot account for
the multiplication and increase necessary to perform the wonders they
accomplished.

There is a book telling how Domenico Fontana of the sixteenth century
set up the Egyptian obelisk at Rome on end, in the Papacy of Sixtus V.
Wonderful! Yet the Egyptians quarried that stone, and carried it a
hundred and fifty miles, and the Romans brought it seven hundred and
fifty miles, and never said a word about it.

Take canals. The Suez canal absorbs half its receipts in cleaning out
the sand which fills it continually, and it is not yet known whether it
is a pecuniary success. The ancients built a canal at right angles to
ours; because they knew it would not fill up if built in that
direction, and they knew such a one as ours would. There were
magnificent canals in the land of the Jews, with perfectly arranged
gates and sluices. We have only just begun to understand ventilation
properly for our houses; yet late experiments at the Pyramids in Egypt
show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the most perfect and
scientific manner.

Again, cement is modern, for the ancients dressed and joined their
stones so closely, that, in buildings thousands of years old the thin
blade of a penknife cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates
back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a knowledge of steam. A
painting has been discovered of a ship full of machinery, and a could
only be accounted for by supposing the motive power to have been steam.
Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea of his celebrated lock from
an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville says that there was no
social question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt.

"Well," say you, "Franklin invented the lightning rod." I have no doubt
he did; but years before his invention, and before muskets were
invented, the old soldiers on guard on the towers used Franklin's
invention to keep guard with; and if a spark passed between them and
the spearhead, they ran and bore the warning of the state and condition
of affairs. After that you will admit that Benjamin Franklin was not
the only one that knew of the presence of electricity, and the
advantages derived from its use. Solomon's Temple you will find was
situated on an exposed point of the hill: the temple was so lofty that
it was often in peril, and was guarded by a system exactly like that of
Benjamin Franklin.

Well, I may tell you a little of ancient manufactures. The Duchess of
Burgundy took a necklace from the neck of a mummy, and wore it to a
ball given at the Tuileries; and everybody said they thought it was the
newest thing there. A Hindoo princess came into court; and her father,
seeing her, said, "Go home, you are not decently covered,--go home;"
and she said, "Father, I have seven suits on;" but the suits were of
muslin so thin that the king could see through them, A Roman poet says,
"the girl was in the poetic dress of the country." I fancy the French
would be rather astonished at this. Four hundred and fifty years ago
the first spinning machine was introduced into Europe. I have evidence
to show that it made its first appearance two thousand years before.

Why have I groped among these ashes? I have told you these facts to
show you that we have not invented everything--that we do not
monopolize the encyclopedia. The past had knowledge. But it was the
knowledge of the classes, not of the masses. "The beauty that was
Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" were exclusive, the possession
of the few. The science of Egypt was amazing; but it meant privilege--
the privilege of the king and the priest. It separated royalty and
priesthood from the people, and was the engine of oppression. When
Cambyses came down from Persia and thundered across Egypt, treading out
royalty and priesthood, he trampled out at the same time civilization
itself.

The distinctive glory of the nineteenth century is that it distributes
knowledge; that it recognizes the divine will, which is that every man
has a right to know whatever may be serviceable to himself or to his
fellows; that it makes the church, the schoolhouse, and the town hall,
its symbols, and humanity its care. This democratic spirit will animate
our arts with immortality, if God means that they shall last.


A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

An extract from "A Man Without a Country"

BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE

Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the "Legion of
the West," as the Western division of our army was then called. When
Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in
1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the
devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow; at some
dinner party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him,
took him a day or two's voyage in his flatboat, and, in short,
fascinated him. For the next year, barrack life was very tame to poor
Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man
had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the
poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in
reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at
him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a
politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and
high-low-jack. But one day Nolan had his revenge. This time Burr came
down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but
as a disguised conquerer. He had defeated I know not how many district
attorneys; he had dined at I know not how many public dinners; he had
been heralded in I don't know how many "Weekly Arguses," and it was
rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him. It was
a great day--his arrival--to poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the fort
an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked Nolan to take him
out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cottonwood tree, as he
said--really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan
was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though he did not yet know
it, he lived as A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you. It is none of our
business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson
and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel
all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great
treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant
Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is to-
day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage; and, to
while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for
"spectacles," a string of court-martials on the officers there. One and
another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the
list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence
enough--that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false
to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any
one who would follow him had the order been signed, "By command of His
Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped--rightly
for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I
would never have heard of him, but that, when the president of the
court asked him at the close whether he wished to say anything to show
that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in
a fit of frenzy:--"Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of
the United States again!"

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who
was holding the court. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of
those days, in the midst of "Spanish plot," "Orleans plot," and all the
rest. He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses
in Texas; and, in a word, to him "United States" was scarcely a
reality. Yet he had been fed by "United States" for all the years since
he had been in the army. He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be
true to "United States." It was "United States" which gave him the
uniform he wore, and the sword by his side. I do not excuse Nolan; I
only explain to the reader why he damned his country, and wished he
might never hear her name again.

He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September
23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name
again. For that half century and more he was a man without a country.

Old Morgan, as I said, was terribly shocked. He called the court into
his private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face like a
sheet, to say:--

"Prisoner, hear the sentence of the court! The court decides, subject
to the approval of the president, that you never hear the name of the
United States again."

Nolan laughed. But nobody else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn, and
the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Even Nolan lost
his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added:--

"Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat, and
deliver him to the naval commander there."

The marshal gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of court.

"Mr. Marshal," continued old Morgan, "see that no one mentions the
United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to
Lieutenant Mitchell at Orleans, and request him to order that no one
shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board
ship. You will receive your written orders from the officer on duty
here this evening. The court is adjourned without day."

The plan then adopted was substantially the same which was necessarily
followed ever after. The Secretary of the Navy was requested to put
Nolan on board a government vessel bound on a long cruise, and to
direct that he should be only so far confined there as to make it
certain that he never saw or heard of the country. One afternoon a lot
of the men sat on the deck smoking and reading aloud. Well, so it
happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the others;
and he read very well. Nobody in the circle knew a line of the poem,
only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten thousand years
ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto without a thought
of what was coming:--

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,"--

It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first
time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on,
still unconsciously or mechanically:--

"This is my own, my native land!"

Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through,
I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on:--

"Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?--
If such there breathe, go, mark him well,"--

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any
way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of
mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on:--

"For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite these titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,"--

and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung
the book into the sea, vanished into his stateroom, and we did not see
him for two months again. He never entered in with the young men
exactly as a companion again; but generally he had the nervous, tired
look of a heart-wounded man.

And when Nolan died, there was found in his Bible a slip of paper at
the place where he had marked the text:--

"They desire a country, even a heavenly; wherefore God is not ashamed
to be called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city."

On this slip of paper he had written:--

"Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it. But will not
some one set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams or at Orleans, that
my disgrace may not be more than I ought to bear? Say on it:--
"In Memory of
"PHILIP NOLAN,
"_Lieutenant in the Army of the United States_.
"He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but
no man deserved less at her hands."


THE EXECUTION OF RODRIGUEZ

From "Cuba in War Time," with the author's permission

BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Adolfo Rodriguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer. When the
revolution broke out, young Rodriguez joined the insurgents, leaving
his father and mother and two sisters at the farm. He was taken by the
Spanish, was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the
government, and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning before
sunrise. His execution took place a half mile distant from the city, on
the great plain that stretches from the forts out to the hills, beyond
which Rodriguez had lived for nineteen years.

There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and when
the squad of soldiers marched out from town, it was still shining
brightly through the mists. It lighted a plain two miles in extent
broken by ridges and gullies and covered with thick, high grass and
with bunches of cactus and palmetto.

The execution was quickly finished with rough, and, but for one
frightful blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it
came to the square of soldiery, and the condemned man, the priests, and
the firing squad of six young volunteers passed in and the lines closed
behind them.

Rodriguez bent and kissed the cross which the priest held up before
him. He then walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and
turned his back to the square and faced the hills and the road across
them which led to his father's farm. As the officer gave the first
command he straightened himself as far as the cords would allow, and
held up his head and fixed his eyes immovably on the morning light
which had just begun to show above the hills.

The officer had given the order, the men had raised their pieces, and
the condemned man had heard the clicks of the triggers as they were
pulled back, and he had not moved. And then happened one of the most
cruelly refined, though unintentional, acts of torture that one can
very well imagine. As the officer slowly raised his sword, preparatory
to giving the signal, one of the mounted officers rode up to him and
pointed out silently--the firing squad were so placed that when they
fired they would shoot several of the soldiers stationed on the extreme
end of the square.

Their captain motioned his men to lower their pieces, and then walked
across the grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of the waiting
prisoner. It is not pleasant to think what that shock must have been.
The man had steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets in the back.
He believed that in the next instant he would be in another world; he
had heard the command given, had heard the click of the Mausers as the
locks caught--and then, at that supreme moment, a human hand had been
laid upon his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear.

You would expect that any man who had been snatched back to life in
such a fashion would start and tremble at the reprieve, or would break
down altogether, but this boy turned his head steadily, and followed
with his eyes the direction of the officer's sword, then nodded his
head gravely, and with his shoulders squared, took up a new position,
straightened his back again, and once more held himself erect. As an
exhibition of self-control this should surely rank above feats of
heroism performed in battle, where there are thousands of comrades to
give inspiration. This man was alone, in sight of the hills he knew,
with only enemies about him, with no source to draw on for strength but
that which lay within himself.

The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily
whipped up his sword, the men once more leveled their rifles, the sword
rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cuban's head
snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as
though some one had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had
stumbled. He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or
sound, and did not move again.

At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in
the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all the
splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and filled the air
with warmth and light.




THE INFORMAL DISCUSSION


THE FLOOD OF BOOKS

From "Essays in Application," with the permission of Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York, publishers.

BY HENRY VAN DYKE

There is the highest authority for believing that a man's life, even
though he be an author, consists not in the abundance of things that he
possesses. Rather is its real value to be sought in the quality of the
ideas and feelings that possess him, and in the effort to embody them
in his work.

The work is the great thing. The delight of clear and steady thought,
of free and vivid imagination, of pure and strong emotion; the
fascination of searching for the right words, which sometimes come in
shoals like herring, so that the net can hardly contain them, and at
other times are more shy and fugacious than the wary trout which refuse
to be lured from their hiding places; the pleasure of putting the fit
phrase in the proper place, of making a conception stand out plain and
firm with no more and no less than is needed for its expression, of
doing justice to an imaginary character so that it shall have its own
life and significance in the world of fiction, of working a plot or an
argument clean through to its inevitable close: these inward and
unpurchasable joys are the best wages of the men and women who write.

What more will they get? Well, unless history forgets to repeat itself,
their additional wages, their personal dividends under the profit-
sharing system, so to speak, will be various. Some will probably get
more than they deserve, others less.

The next best thing to the joy of work is the winning of gentle readers
and friends who find some good in your book, and are grateful for it,
and think kindly of you for writing it.

The next best thing to that is the recognition, on the part of people
who know, that your work is well done, and of fine quality. That is
called fame, or glory, and the writer who professes to care nothing for
it is probably deceiving himself, or else his liver is out of order.
Real reputation, even of a modest kind and of a brief duration, is a
good thing; an author ought to be able to be happy without it, but
happier with it.


EFFECTIVENESS IN SPEAKING

From the Introduction to "The World's Famous Orations," with the
permission of Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York and London,
publishers.

BY WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

While it is absolutely necessary for the orator to master his subject
and to speak with earnestness, his speech can be made more effective by
the addition of clearness, brevity and apt illustrations.

Clearness of statement is of very great importance. It is not
sufficient to say that there are certain self-evident truths; it is
more accurate to say that all truth is self-evident. Because truth is
self-evident, the best service that one can render a truth is to state
it so clearly that it can be comprehended, needs no argument in its
support. In debate, therefore, one's first effort should be to state
his own side so clearly and concisely as to make the principles
involved easily understood. His second object should be so to divest
his opponent's argument of useless verbiage as to make it stand forth
clearly; for as truth is self-evident, so error bears upon its face its
own condemnation. Error needs only to be exposed to be overthrown.

Brevity of statement also contributes to the force of a speaker. It is
possible so to enfold a truth in long-drawn-out sentences as
practically to conceal it. The epigram is powerful because it is full
of meat and short enough to be remembered. To know when to stop is
almost as important as to know where to begin and how to proceed. The
ability to condense great thoughts into small words and brief sentences
is an attribute of genius. Often one lays down a book with the feeling
that the author has "said nothing with elaboration," while in perusing
another book one finds a whole sermon in a single sentence, or an
unanswerable argument couched in a well-turned phrase.

The interrogatory is frequently employed by the orator, and when wisely
used is irresistible. What dynamic power for instance, there is in that
question propounded by Christ, "What shall it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?" Volumes could not have
presented so effectively the truth that he sought to impress upon his
hearers.

The illustration has no unimportant place in the equipment of the
orator. We understand a thing more easily when we know that it is like
something which we have already seen. Illustrations may be drawn from
two sources--nature and literature--and of the two, those from nature
have the greater weight. All learning is valuable; all history is
useful. By knowing what has been we can better judge the future; by
knowing how men have acted heretofore we can understand how they will
act again in similar circumstances. But people know nature better than
they know books, and the illustrations drawn from everyday life are the
most effective.

If the orator can seize upon something within the sight or hearing of
his audience,--something that comes to his notice at the moment and as
if not thought of before,--it will add to the effectiveness of the
illustration. For instance, Paul's speech to the Athenians derived a
large part of its strength from the fact that he called attention to an
altar near by, erected "to the Unknown God," and then proceeded to
declare unto them the God whom they ignorantly worshiped.

Abraham Lincoln used scripture quotations very frequently and very
powerfully. Probably no Bible quotation, or, for that matter, no
quotation from any book ever has had more influence upon a people than
the famous quotation made by Lincoln in his Springfield speech of
1858,--"A house divided against itself cannot stand." It is said that
he had searched for some time for a phrase which would present in the
strongest possible way the proposition he intended to advance--namely,
that the nation could not endure half slave and half free.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.