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Public Speaking

I >> Irvah Lester Winter >> Public Speaking




What can overturn such a proof as this? Surely a good man might,
without superstition, believe that such a union of events was something
more than natural, and that a Divine Providence was watchful for the
protection of innocence and truth.

I may now, therefore, relieve you from the pain of hearing me any
longer, and be myself relieved from speaking on a subject which
agitates and distresses me. Since Lord George Gordon stands clear of
every hostile act or purpose against the Legislature of his country, or
the properties of his fellow-subjects--since the whole tenor of conduct
repels the belief of the _traitorous intention_ charged by the
indictment--my task is finished. I shall make no address to your
passions. I will not remind you of the long and rigorous imprisonment
he has suffered; I will not speak to you of his great youth, of his
illustrious birth, and of his uniformly animated and generous zeal in
Parliament for the Constitution of his country. Such topics might be
useful in the balance; yet, even then, I should have trusted to the
honest hearts of Englishmen to have felt them without excitation. At
present, the plain and rigid rules of justice and truth are sufficient
to entitle me to your verdict.


PRONOUNCING SENTENCE FOR HIGH TREASON

BY SIR ALFRED WILLS

Arthur Alfred Lynch, otherwise Arthur Lynch, the jury have found you
guilty of the crime of high treason, a crime happily so rare that in
the present day a trial for treason seems to be almost an anachronism--
a thing of the past. The misdeeds which have been done in this case,
and which have brought you to the lamentable pass in which you stand,
must surely convince the most skeptical and apathetic of the gravity
and reality of the crime. What was your action in the darkest hour of
your country's fortunes, when she was engaged in the deadly struggle
from which she has just emerged? You joined the ranks of your country's
foes. Born in Australia, a land which has nobly shown its devotion to
its parent country, you have indeed taken a different course from that
which was adopted by her sons. You have fought against your country,
not with it. You have sought, as far as you could, to dethrone Great
Britain from her place among the nations, to make her name a byword and
a reproach, a synonym for weakness and irresolution. Nor can I forget
that you have shed the blood, or done your best to shed the blood, of
your countrymen who were fighting for their country. How many wives
have been made widows, how many children orphans, by what you and those
who acted under your command have done, Heaven only knows! You thought
it safe at that dark hour of the Empire's fate, when Ladysmith, when
Kimberley, when Mafeking, were in the very jaws of deadly peril--you
thought it safe, no doubt, to lift the parricidal hand against your
country. You thought she would shrink from the costly struggle wearied
out by her gigantic efforts, and that, at the worst, a general peace
would be made which would comprehend a general amnesty and cover up
such acts as yours and save you from personal peril. You misjudged your
country and failed to appreciate that, though slow to enter into a
quarrel, however slow to take up arms, it has yet been her wont that in
the quarrel she shall bear herself so that the opposer may beware of
her, and that she is seldom so dangerous to her enemies as when the
hour of national calamity has raised the dormant energies of her
people--knit together every nerve and fiber of the body politic, and
has made her sons determined to do all, to sacrifice all on behalf of
the country that gave them birth. And against what a Sovereign and what
a country did you lift your hand! A Sovereign the best beloved and most
deeply honored of all the long line of English Kings and Queens, and
whose lamented death was called back to my remembrance only yesterday
as a fresh sorrow to many an English household. Against a country which
has been the home of progress and freedom, and under whose beneficent
sway, whenever you have chosen to stay within her dominions, you have
enjoyed a liberty of person, a freedom of speech and action, such as
you can have in no other country in Europe, and it is not too much to
say in no other country in the world. The only--I will not say excuse,
but palliation that I can find for conduct like yours is that it has
been for some years past the fashion to treat lightly matters of this
kind, so that men have been perhaps encouraged to play with sedition
and to toy with treason, wrapt in a certain proud consciousness of
strength begotten of the deep-seated and well-founded conviction that
the loyalty of her people is supreme, and true authority in this
country has slumbered or has treated with contemptuous indifference
speeches and acts of sedition. It may be that you have been misled into
the notion that, no matter what you did, so long as your conduct could
be called a political crime, it was of no consequence. But it is one
thing to talk sedition and to do small seditious acts, it is quite
another thing to bear arms in the ranks of the foes of your country,
and against it. Between the two the difference is immeasurable. But had
you and those with whom you associated yourself succeeded, what fatal
mischief might have been done to the great inheritance which has been
bequeathed to us by our forefathers--that inheritance of power which it
must be our work to use nobly and for good things; an inheritance of
influence which will be of little effect even for good unless backed by
power, and of duty which cannot be effectually performed if our power
be shattered and our influence impaired. He who has attempted to do his
country such irreparable wrong must be prepared to submit to the
sentence which it is now my duty to pronounce upon you. The sentence of
this Court--and it is pronounced in regard to each count of the
indictment--is that you be taken hence to the place from which you
came, and from thence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by
the neck until you are dead.


THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON

From the Official Records of the Trial in the United States Senate,
1868

BY GEORGE S. BOUTWELL

Andrew Johnson has disregarded and violated the laws and Constitution
of his own country. Under his administration the government has not
been strengthened, but weakened. Its reputation and influence at home
and abroad have been injured and diminished. Ten States of this Union
are without law, without security, without safety; public order
everywhere violated, public justice nowhere respected; and all in
consequence of the evil purposes and machinations of the President.
Forty millions of people have been rendered anxious and uncertain as to
the preservation of public peace and the perpetuity of the institutions
of freedom in this country. All classes are oppressed by the private
and public calamities which he has brought upon them. They appeal to
you for relief. The nation waits in anxiety for the conclusion of these
proceedings. Forty millions of people, whose interest in public affairs
is in the wise and just administration of the laws, look to this
tribunal as a sure defense against the encroachments of a criminally
minded Chief Magistrate.

Will any one say that the heaviest judgment which you can render is any
adequate punishment for these crimes? Your office is not punishment,
but to secure the safety of the republic. But human tribunals are
inadequate to punish those criminals who, as rulers or magistrates, by
their example, conduct, policy, and crimes, become the scourge of
communities and nations. No picture, no power of the imagination, can
illustrate or conceive the suffering of the poor but loyal people of
the South. A patriotic, virtuous, law-abiding chief magistrate would
have healed the wounds of war, soothed private and public sorrows,
protected the weak, encouraged the strong, and lifted from the Southern
people the burdens which now are greater than they can bear.

Travelers and astronomers inform us that in the southern heavens, near
the southern cross, there is a vast space which the uneducated call the
hole in the sky, where the eye of man, with the aid of the powers of
the telescope, has been unable to discover nebulae, or asteroid, or
comet, or planet, or star, or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark region of
space, which is only known to be less than infinite by the evidences of
creation elsewhere, the Great Author of celestial mechanism has left
the chaos which was in the beginning. If this earth were capable of the
sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal
beings are the evidences and the pledge of our Divine origin and
immortal destiny, it would heave and throw, with the energy of the
elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy of two races of men
into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as
life, or as the absence of life, emblematical of, if not really, that
"outer darkness" of which the Savior of man spoke in warning to those
who are the enemies of themselves, of their race, and of their God. But
it is yours to relieve, not to punish. This done and our country is
again advanced in the intelligent opinion of mankind. In other
governments an unfaithful ruler can be removed only by revolution,
violence, or force. The proceeding here is judicial, and according to
the forms of law. Your judgment will be enforced without the aid of a
policeman or a soldier. What other evidence will be needed of the value
of republican institutions? What other test of the strength and vigor
of our government? What other assurance that the virtue of the people
is equal to any emergency of national life?


BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS

Mr. Chief Justice and Senators,--If indeed we have arrived at a settled
conclusion that this is a court, that it is governed by the law, that
it is to confine its attention to the facts applicable to the law, and
regard the sole evidence of those facts to be embraced within the
testimony of witnesses or documents produced in court, we have made
great progress in separating, at least, from your further consideration
much that has been impressed upon your attention heretofore. It follows
from this that the President is to be tried upon the charges which are
produced here, and not upon common fame.

I may as conveniently at this point of the argument as at any other pay
some attention to the astronomical punishment which the learned and
honorable manager, Mr. Boutwell, thinks should be applied to this novel
case of impeachment of the President. Cicero I think it is who says
that a lawyer should know everything, for sooner or later there is no
fact in history, in science, or of human knowledge that will not come
into play in his arguments. Painfully sensible of my ignorance, being
devoted to a profession which "sharpens and does not enlarge the mind,"
I yet can admire without envy the superior knowledge evinced by the
honorable manager. Indeed, upon my soul, I believe he is aware of an
astronomical fact which many professors of that science are wholly
ignorant of. But nevertheless, while some of his honorable colleagues
were paying attention to an unoccupied and unappropriated island on the
surface of the seas, Mr. Manager Boutwell, more ambitious, had
discovered an untenanted and unappropriated region in the skies,
reserved, he would have us think, in the final councils of the
Almighty, as the place of punishment for convicted and deposed American
Presidents.

At first I thought that his mind had become so "enlarged" that it was
not "sharp" enough to discover the Constitution had limited the
punishment; but on reflection I saw that he was as legal and logical as
he was ambitious and astronomical, for the Constitution has said
"removal from office," and has put no limit to the distance of the
removal, so that it may be, without shedding a drop of his blood, or
taking a penny of his property, or confining his limbs, instant removal
from office and transportation to the skies. Truly, this is a great
undertaking; and if the learned manager can only get over the obstacles
of the laws of nature the Constitution will not stand in his way. He
can contrive no method but that of a convulsion of the earth that shall
project the deposed President to this infinitely distant space; but a
shock of nature of so vast an energy and for so great a result on him
might unsettle even the footing of the firm members of Congress. We
certainly need not resort to so perilous a method as that. How shall we
accomplish it? Why, in the first place, nobody knows where that space
is but the learned manager himself, and he is the necessary deputy to
execute the judgment of the court.

Let it then be provided that in case of your sentence of deposition and
removal from office the honorable and astronomical manager shall take
into his own hands the execution of the sentence. With the President
made fast to his broad and strong shoulders, and, having already
essayed the flight by imagination, better prepared than anybody else to
execute it in form, taking the advantage of ladders as far as ladders
will go to the top of this great Capitol, and spurning then with his
foot the crest of Liberty, let him set out upon his flight, while the
two houses of Congress and all the people of the United States shall
shout, "_Sic itur ad astra_."

II

But here a distressing doubt strikes me; how will the manager get back?
He will have got far beyond the reach of gravitation to restore him,
and so ambitious a wing as his could never stoop to a downward flight.
Indeed, as he passes through the constellations, that famous question
of Carlyle by which he derides the littleness of human affairs upon the
scale of the measure of the heavens, "What thinks Bœotes as he drives
his dogs up the zenith in their race of sidereal fire?" will force
itself on his notice. What, indeed, would Bœotes think of this new
constellation?

Besides, reaching this space, beyond the power of Congress even "to
send for persons and papers," how shall he return, and how decide in
the contest, there become personal and perpetual, the struggle of
strength between him and the President? In this new revolution, thus
established forever, who shall decide which is the sun and which is the
moon? Who determine the only scientific test which reflects the hardest
upon the other?

Mr. Chief Justice and Senators, we have come all at once to the great
experiences and trials of a full-grown nation, all of which we thought
we should escape--the distractions of civil strife, the exhaustions of
powerful war. We could summon from the people a million of men and
inexhaustible treasure to help the Constitution in its time of need.
Can we summon now resources enough of civil prudence and of restraint
of passion to carry us through this trial, so that whatever result may
follow, in whatever form, the people may feel that the Constitution has
received no wound! To this court, the last and best resort for this
determination, it is to be left. And oh, if you could only carry
yourselves back to the spirit and the purpose and the wisdom and the
courage of the framers of the government, how safe would it be in your
hands? How safe is it now in your hands, for you who have entered into
their labors will see to it that the structure of your work comports in
durability and excellence with theirs. Indeed, so familiar has the
course of the argument made us with the names of the men of the
convention and of the first Congress that I could sometimes seem to
think that the presence even of the Chief Justice was replaced by the
serene majesty of Washington, and that from Massachusetts we had Adams
and Ames, from Connecticut, Sherman and Ellsworth, from New Jersey,
Paterson and Boudinot, and from New York, Hamilton and Benson, and that
they were to determine this case for us. Act, then, as if under this
serene and majestic presence your deliberations were to be conducted to
their close, and the Constitution was to come out from the watchful
solicitude of these great guardians of it as if from their own judgment
in this court of impeachment.




THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH


AT A UNIVERSITY CLUB DINNER

Reprinted, with the author's permission, from a speech at a dinner of
The Harvard Club of New York City.

BY HENRY E. HOWLAND

There should be a proper amount of modesty in one called upon to
address such an intelligent audience of educated men as I see before
me, and I am conscious of it in the same sense as the patient who said
to his physician, "I suffer a great deal from nervous dyspepsia, and I
attribute it to the fact that I attend so many public dinners." "Ah, I
see," said the doctor, "you are often called upon to speak, and the
nervous apprehension upsets your digestion." "Not at all; my
apprehension is entirely on account of the other speakers; I never say
a thing;" and it is with some hesitation that I respond to your call.

Following out that line of thought, there is a great deal that is
attractive in a gathering of College men. They have such a winsome and
a winning way with them.

Richest in endowments, foremost in progress, honored by the renown of a
long line of distinguished sons, the university that claims you is
worthy of the homage and respect which it receives from the educated
men of America.

The study of the development of the human race by educational processes
which change by necessity under changing conditions and environment, is
one of the most interesting that we can engage in. The greatest men of
this country, or any other, have not always been made by the
university, however it may be with the average. You cannot always tell
by a man's degree what manner of man he is likely to be. But the value
of a technical or academic training is apparent as time goes on,
population increases, occupations multiply and compete, and the strife
of life becomes more fierce and strenuous.

Many in these days seem to prefer notoriety to fame, because it runs
along the line of least resistance. A man has to climb for fame, but he
can get notoriety by an easy tumble. And others forget the one
essential necessary to success, of personal effort, and, assuming there
is a royal road to learning, are content with the distinction of a
degree from a university, without caring for what it implies, and
answer as the son did to his father who asked him: "Why don't you work,
my son? If you only knew how much happiness work brings, you would
begin at once." "Father, I am trying to lead a life of self-denial in
which happiness cuts no figure; do not tempt me."

But notwithstanding all these tendencies, the level of mankind is
raised at these fountains of learning, the tone is higher, and the
standards are continually advanced. The discipline and the training
reaches and acts upon a willing and eager army of young recruits and
works its salutary effect, like that upon a man who listened with rapt
attention to a discourse from the pulpit and was congratulated upon his
devotion, and asked if he was not impressed. "Yes," he replied, "for it
is a mighty poor sermon that doesn't hit me somewhere."

However discouraging the action of our governing bodies through the
obstruction and perverse action of an ignorant or corrupt majority or
minority in them may be in the administration of great public affairs,
the time at last comes when the nation arouses from its lethargy,
shakes off its torpor, shows the strain of its blood, and follows its
trained and intelligent leaders, like the man who, in a time of sore
distress, after the ancient fashion, put ashes on his head, rent his
garments, tore off his coat, his waistcoat, his shirt, and his
undershirt, and at last came to himself. At such times, by the
universal voice of public opinion and amid hearty applause of the whole
people, we welcome to public office and the highest responsible
stations such men as our universities have given to the country. It
matters not to what family we belong--Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or
Princeton--we are all of us one in our welcome to them, for they
represent the university spirit and what it teaches--honor, high-
mindedness, intelligence, truthfulness, unselfishness, courage, and
patriotism.


THE EVACUATION OF NEW YORK

Reprinted with the author's permission

BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE

Mr. President and Gentlemen,--I came here to-night with some notes for
a speech in my pocket, but I have been sitting next to General Butler,
and in the course of the evening they have mysteriously disappeared.
The consequence is, gentlemen, that you may expect a very good speech
from him and a very poor one from me. When I read this toast which you
have just drunk in honor of Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen of Great
Britain, and heard how you received the letter of the British Minister
that was read in response, and how heartily you joined in singing "God
Save the Queen," when I look up and down these tables and see among you
so many representatives of English capital and English trade, I have my
doubts whether the evacuation of New York by the British was quite as
thorough and lasting as history would fain have us believe. If George
III, who certainly did all he could to despoil us of our rights and
liberties and bring us to ruin--if he could rise from his grave and see
how his granddaughter is honored at your hands to-night, why, I think
he would return whence he came, thanking God that his efforts to
enslave us, in which for eight long years he drained the resources of
the British Empire, were not successful.

The truth is, the boasted triumph of New York in getting rid of the
British once and forever has proved, after all, to be but a dismal
failure. We drove them out in one century only to see them return in
the next to devour our substance and to carry off all the honors. We
have just seen the noble Chief Justice of England, the feasted favorite
of all America, making a triumphal tour across the Continent and
carrying all before him at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Night after
night at our very great cost we have been paying the richest tribute to
the reigning monarch of the British stage, and nowhere in the world are
English men and women of character and culture received with a more
hearty welcome, a more earnest hospitality, than in this very state of
New York. The truth is, that this event that we celebrate to-day, which
sealed the independence of America and seemed for a time to give a
staggering blow to the prestige and the power of England, has proved to
be no less a blessing to her own people than to ours. The latest and
best of the English historians has said that, however important the
independence of America might be in the history of England, it was of
overwhelming importance in the history of the world, and that though it
might have crippled for a while the supremacy of the English nation, it
founded the supremacy of the English race. And in the same spirit we
welcome the fact that those social, political, and material barriers
that separated the two nations a century ago have now utterly vanished;
that year by year we are being drawn closer and closer together, and
that this day may be celebrated with equal fitness on both sides of the
Atlantic and by all who speak the English tongue.


TIES OF KINSHIP

From "Modern Eloquence," Vol. I, Geo. L. Shuman and Company, Chicago,
publishers.

BY SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

When I was conversing recently with Lord Tennyson, he said to me: "It
is bad for us that English will always be a spoken speech, since that
means that it will always be changing, and so the time will come when
you and I will be as hard to read for the common people as Chaucer is
to-day." You remember what opinion your brilliant humorist, Artemus
Ward, let fall concerning that ancient singer. "Mr. Chaucer," he
observed casually, "is an admirable poet, but as a spellist, a very
decided failure."

To the treasure house of that noble tongue the United States has
splendidly contributed. It would be far poorer to-day without the
tender lines of Longfellow, the serene and philosophic pages of
Emerson, the convincing wit and clear criticism of my illustrious
departed friend, James Russell Lowell, the Catullus-like perfection of
the lyrics of Edgar Allan Poe, and the glorious, large-tempered
dithyrambs of Walt Whitman.

These stately and sacred laurel groves grow here in a garden forever
extending, ever carrying further forward, for the sake of humanity, the
irresistible flag of our Saxon supremacy, leading one to falter in an
attempt to eulogize America and the idea of her potency and her
promise. The most elaborate panegyric would seem but a weak
impertinence, which would remind you, perhaps too vividly, of Sydney
Smith, who, when he saw his grandchild pat the back of a large turtle,
asked her why she did so. The little maid replied: "Grandpa, I do it to
please the turtle." "My child," he answered, "you might as well stroke
the dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and chapter"

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