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Public Speaking

I >> Irvah Lester Winter >> Public Speaking




I myself once heard, in our Zoological gardens in London, another
little girl ask her mamma whether it would hurt the elephant if she
offered him a chocolate drop. In that guarded and respectful spirit is
it that I venture to tell you here to-night how truly in England the
peace and prosperity of your republic is desired, and that nothing
except good will is felt by the mass of our people toward you, and
nothing but the greatest satisfaction in your wealth and progress.

Between these two majestic sisters of the Saxon blood the hatchet of
war is, please God, buried. No cause of quarrel, I think and hope, can
ever be otherwise than truly out of proportion to the vaster causes of
affection and accord. We have no longer to prove to each other, or to
the world, that Englishmen and Americans are high-spirited and
fearless; that Englishmen and Americans alike will do justice, and will
have justice, and will put up with nothing else from each other and
from the nations at large. Our proofs are made on both sides, and
indelibly written on the page of history. Not that I wish to speak
platitudes about war. It has been necessary to human progress; it has
bred and preserved noble virtues; it has been inevitable, and may be
again; but it belongs to a low civilization. Other countries have,
perhaps, not yet reached that point of intimate contact and rational
advance, but for us two, at least, the time seems to have come when
violent decisions, and even talk of them, should be as much abolished
between us as cannibalism.

I ventured, when in Washington, to propose to President Harrison that
we should some day, the sooner the better, choose five men of public
worth in the United States, and five in England; give them gold coats
if you please, and a handsome salary, and establish them as a standing
and supreme tribunal of arbitration, referring to them the little
family fallings-out of America and of England, whenever something goes
wrong between us about a sealskin in Behring Strait, a lobster pot, an
ambassador's letter, a border tariff, or an Irish vote. He showed
himself very well disposed toward my suggestion.

Mr. President, in the sacred hope that you take me to be a better poet
than orator, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your
reception to-night, and personally pray for the tranquility and
prosperity of this free and magnificent republic.


CANADA, ENGLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES

From an address in Brewer's "The World's Best Orations," Vol. VII, Ferd
P. Kaiser, St. Louis, Chicago, publishers.

BY SIR WILFRED LAURIER

Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. President, and Gentlemen,--I very fully and very
cordially appreciate the very kind feelings which have just now been
uttered by the toastmaster in terms so eloquent, and which you
gentlemen have accepted and received in so sympathetic a manner. Let me
say at once, in the name of my fellow-Canadians who are here with me
and also, I may say, in the name of the Canadian people, that these
feelings we shall at all times reciprocate; reciprocate, not only in
words evanescent, but in actual living deeds.

Because I must say that I feel that, though the relations between
Canada and the United States are good, though they are brotherly,
though they are satisfactory, in my judgment they are not as good, as
brotherly, as satisfactory as they ought to be. We are of the same
stock. We spring from the same races on one side of the line as on the
other. We speak the same language. We have the same literature, and for
more than a thousand years we have had a common history.

Let me recall to you the lines which, in the darkest days of the Civil
War, the Puritan poet of America issued to England:--

"Oh, Englishmen! Oh, Englishmen!
In hope and creed,
In blood and tongue, are brothers,
We all are heirs of Runnymede."

Brothers we are, in the language of your own poet. May I not say that
while our relations are not always as brotherly as they should have
been, may I not ask, Mr. President, on the part of Canada and on the
part of the United States, if we are sometimes too prone to stand by
the full conceptions of our rights, and exact all our rights to the
last pound of flesh? May I not ask if there have not been too often
between us petty quarrels, which happily do not wound the heart of the
nation?

There was a civil war in the last century. There was a civil war
between England, then, and her colonies. The union which then existed
between England and her colonies was severed. If it was severed,
American citizens, as you know it was, through no fault of your
fathers, the fault was altogether the fault of the British Government
of that day. If the British Government of that day had treated the
American colonies as the British Government for the last twenty or
fifty years has treated its colonies; if Great Britain had given you
then the same degree of liberty which it gives to Canada, my country;
if it had given you, as it has given us, legislative independence
absolute,--the result would have been different; the course of victory,
the course of history, would have been very different.

But what has been done cannot be undone. You cannot expect that the
union which was then severed shall ever be restored; but can we not
expect--can we not hope that the banners of England and the banners of
the United States shall never, never again meet in conflict, except
those conflicts provided by the arts of peace, such as we see to-day in
the harbor of New York in the contest between the _Shamrock_ and
the _Columbia_ for the supremacy of naval architecture and naval
prowess? Can we not hope that if ever the banners of England and the
banners of the United States are again to meet on the battlefield, they
shall meet entwined together in the defense of some holy cause, in the
defense of holy justice, for the defense of the oppressed, for the
enfranchisement of the downtrodden, and for the advancement of liberty,
progress, and civilization?


MONSIEUR AND MADAME

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

BY PAUL BLOUET (MAX O'RELL)

Now, the attitude of men towards women is very different, according to
the different nations to which they belong. You will find a good
illustration of that different attitude of men toward women in France,
in England, and in America, if you go to the dining-rooms of their
hotels. You go to the dining-room, and you take, if you can, a seat
near the entrance door, and you watch the arrival of the couples, and
also watch them as they cross the room and go to the table that is
assigned to them by the head waiter. Now, in Europe, you would find a
very polite head waiter, who invites you to go in, and asks you where
you will sit; but in America the head waiter is a most magnificent
potentate who lies in wait for you at the door, and bids you to follow
him sometimes in the following respectful manner, beckoning, "There."
And you have got to do it, too.

I traveled six times in America, and I never saw a man so daring as not
to sit there. In the tremendous hotels of the large cities, where you
have got to go to Number 992 or something of the sort, I generally got
a little entertainment out of the head waiter. He is so thoroughly
persuaded that it would never enter my head not to follow him, he will
never look round to see if I am there. Why, he knows I am there, but
I'm not. I wait my time, and when he has got to the end I am sitting
down waiting for a chance to be left alone. He says, "You cannot sit
here." I say: "Why not? What is the matter with this seat?" He says,
"You must not sit there." I say, "I don't want a constitutional walk;
don't bother, I'm all right." Once, indeed, after an article in the
_North American Review_--for your head waiter in America reads
reviews--a head waiter told me to sit where I pleased. I said, "Now,
wait a minute, give me time to realize that; do I understand that in
this hotel I am going to sit where I like?" He said, "Certainly!" He
was in earnest. I said, "I should like to sit over there at that table
near the window." He said, "All right, come with me." When I came out,
there were some newspaper people in the hotel waiting for me, and it
was reported in half a column in one of the papers, with one of those
charming headlines which are so characteristic of American journalism,
"Max sits where he likes!" Well, I said, you go to the dining-room, you
take your seat, and you watch the arrival of the couples, and you will
know the position of men. In France Monsieur and Madame come in
together abreast, as a rule arm in arm. They look pleasant, smile, and
talk to each other. They smile at each other, even though married.

In England, in the same class of hotel, John Bull comes in first. He
does not look happy. John Bull loves privacy. He does not like to be
obliged to eat in the presence of lots of people who have not been
introduced to him, and he thinks it very hard he should not have the
whole dining-room to himself. That man, though, mind you, in his own
house undoubtedly the most hospitable, the most kind, the most
considerate of hosts in the world, that man in the dining-room of a
hotel always comes in with a frown. He does not like it, he grumbles,
and mild and demure, with her hands hanging down, modestly follows Mrs.
John Bull. But in America, behold the arrival of Mrs. Jonathan! behold
her triumphant entry, pulling Jonathan behind! Well, I like my own
country, and I cannot help thinking that the proper and right way is
the French. Ladies, you know all our shortcomings. Our hearts are
exposed ever since the rib which covered them was taken off. Yet we ask
you kindly to allow us to go through life with you, like the French,
arm in arm, in good friendship and camaraderie.


THE TYPICAL AMERICAN

From "The New South," with the permission of Henry W. Grady, Jr.

BY HENRY W. GRADY

Pardon me one word, Mr. President, spoken for the sole purpose of
getting into the volumes that go out annually freighted with the rich
eloquence of your speakers--the fact that the Cavalier as well as the
Puritan was on the continent in its early days, and that he was "up and
able to be about." I have read your books carefully and I find no
mention of that fact, which seems to me an important one for preserving
a sort of historical equilibrium if for nothing else. Let me remind you
that the Virginia Cavalier first challenged France on this continent--
that Cavalier, John Smith, gave New England its very name, and was so
pleased with the job that he has been handing his own name around ever
since--and that while Miles Standish was cutting off men's ears for
courting a girl without her parents' consent, and forbade men to kiss
their wives on Sunday, the Cavalier was courting everything in sight,
and that the Almighty had vouchsafed great increase to the Cavalier
colonies, the huts in the wilderness being full as the nests in the
woods.

But having incorporated the Cavalier as a fact in your charming little
books, I shall let him work out his own salvation, as he always has
done with engaging gallantry, and we will hold no controversy as to his
merits. Why should we? Neither Puritan nor Cavalier long survive as
such. The virtues and traditions of both happily still live for the
inspiration of their sons and the saving of the old fashion. But both
Puritan and Cavalier were lost in the storm of the first Revolution;
and the American citizen, supplanting both and stronger than either,
took possession of the Republic bought by their common blood and
fashioned to wisdom, and charged himself with teaching men government
and establishing the voice of the people as the voice of God.

My friend Dr. Talmage has told you that the typical American has yet to
come. Let me tell you that he has already come. Great types, like
valuable plants, are slow to flower and fruit. But from the union of
these colonist Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their
purposes and the crossing of their blood, slow perfecting through a
century, came he who stands as the first typical American, the first
who comprehended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all
the majesty and grace, of this Republic--Abraham Lincoln. He was the
sum of Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the
virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both
were lost. He was greater than Puritan, greater than Cavalier, in that
he was American, and in that in his homely form were first gathered the
vast and thrilling forces of his ideal government--charging it with
such tremendous meaning and so elevating it above human suffering that
martyrdom, though infamously aimed, came as a fitting crown to a life
consecrated from the cradle to human liberty. Let us, each cherishing
the traditions and honoring his fathers, build with reverent hands to
the type of this simple but sublime life, in which all types are
honored; and in our common glory as Americans there will be plenty and
to spare for your forefathers and for mine.


THE PILGRIM MOTHERS

Reprinted with the author's permission

BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE

I really don't know, at this late hour, Mr. Chairman, how you expect me
to treat this difficult and tender subject.

I might take up the subject etymologically, and try and explain how
woman ever acquired that remarkable name. But that has been done before
me by a poet with whose stanzas you are not familiar, but whom you will
recognize as deeply versed in this subject, for he says:--

"When Eve brought woe to all mankind,
Old Adam called her woe-man,
But when she woo'd with love so kind,
He then pronounced her woman.

"But now, with folly and with pride,
Their husbands' pockets trimming,
The ladies are so full of whims
That people call them w(h)imen."

Mr. Chairman, I believe you said I should say something about the
Pilgrim mothers. Well, sir, it is rather late in the evening to venture
upon that historic subject. But, for one, I pity them. The occupants of
the galleries will bear me witness that even these modern Pilgrims--
these Pilgrims with all the modern improvements--how hard it is to put
up with their weaknesses, their follies, their tyrannies, their
oppressions, their desire of dominion and rule. But when you go back to
the stern horrors of the Pilgrim rule, when you contemplate the rugged
character of the Pilgrim fathers, why, you give credence to what a
witty woman of Boston said--she had heard enough of the glories and
sufferings of the Pilgrim fathers; for her part, she had a world of
sympathy for the Pilgrim mothers, because they not only endured all
that the Pilgrim fathers had done, but they also had to endure the
Pilgrim fathers to boot. Well, sir, they were afraid of woman. They
thought she was almost too refined a luxury for them to indulge in.
Miles Standish spoke for them all, and I am sure that General Sherman,
who so much resembles Miles Standish, not only in his military renown
but in his rugged exterior and in his warm and tender heart, will echo
his words when he says:--

"I can march up to a fortress, and summon the place to surrender, But
march up to a woman with such a proposal, I dare not. I am not afraid
of bullets, nor shot from the mouth of a cannon, But of a thundering
'No!' point-blank from the mouth of a woman, That I confess I'm afraid
of, nor am I ashamed to confess it."

Mr. President, did you ever see a more self-satisfied or contented set
of men than these that are gathered at these tables this evening? I
never come to the Pilgrim dinner and see these men, who have achieved
in the various departments of life such definite and satisfactory
success, but that I look back twenty or thirty or forty years, and see
the lantern-jawed boy who started out from the banks of the
Connecticut, or some more remote river of New England, with five
dollars in his pocket and his father's blessing on his head and his
mother's Bible in his carpetbag, to seek those fortunes which now they
have so gloriously made. And there is one woman whom each of these,
through all his progress and to the last expiring hour of his life,
bears in tender remembrance. It is the mother who sent him forth with
her blessing. A mother is a mother still--the holiest thing alive; and
if I could dismiss you with a benediction to-night, it would be by
invoking upon the heads of you all the blessing of the mothers that we
left behind us.


BRIGHT LAND TO WESTWARD

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

BY E. O. WOLCOTT

Mr. President and Gentlemen,--It was with great diffidence that I
accepted the invitation of your President to respond to a toast to-
night. I realized my incapacity to do justice to the occasion, while at
the same time I recognized the high compliment conveyed. I felt
somewhat as the man did respecting the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy;
he said he didn't know whether Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works or
not, but if he didn't, he missed the greatest opportunity of his life.

We are a plain people, and live far away. We are provincial; we have no
distinctive literature and no great poets; our leading personage abroad
of late seems to be the Honorable "Buffalo Bill"; and we use our
adjectives so recklessly that the polite badinage indulged in toward
each other by your New York editors to us seems tame and spiritless. In
mental achievement we may not have fully acquired the use of the fork,
and are "but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of
manhood." We stand toward the East somewhat as country to city cousin;
about as New to Old England, only we don't feel half so badly about it,
and on the whole are rather pleased with ourselves. There is not in the
whole broad West a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is
not within reach of it. With generous help from the East, Western
colleges are elevating and directing Western thought, and men busy
making States yet find time to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All
this may not be aesthetic, but it is virile, and it leads up and not
down.

There are some things more important than the highest culture. The West
is the Almighty's reserve ground, and as the world is filling up, He is
turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres, and is
sending there the rain as well as the sunshine. A high and glorious
destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the other
side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must find
waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy
people:--

"Who love the land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a King upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his Majesty."

In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee
reënforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of
them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater.
Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States,
and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in
the future, even more than in the past, the heads of the New England
households weary not in the good work.

In these days of "booms" and New Souths and Great Wests, when everybody
up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to apologize for
it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a sort of tendency
to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much considered; and New
England being small in area and most of her distinguished people being
dead, she is just now somewhat under an eclipse. But in her past she
has undying fame. You of New England and her borders live always in the
atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements
are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of
their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness. The sons of New
England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy
shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble
traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage,
and we never wander so far away from her that, with each recurring
anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed
love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet--

"Not by Eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But Westward, look, the land is bright!"


WOMAN

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

BY THEODORE TILTON

You must not forget, Mr. President, in eulogizing the early men of New
England, who are your clients to-night, that it was only through the
help of the early women of New England, who are mine, that your boasted
heroes could ever have earned their title of the Pilgrim Fathers. A
health, therefore, to the women in the cabin of the Mayflower! A
cluster of Mayflowers themselves, transplanted from summer in the old
world to winter in the new! Counting over those matrons and maidens,
they numbered, all told, just eighteen. Their names are now written
among the heroines of history! For as over the ashes of Cornelia stood
the epitaph "The Mother of the Gracchi," so over these women of the
Pilgrimage we write as proudly "The Mothers of the Republic." There was
good Mistress Bradford, whose feet were not allowed of God to kiss
Plymouth Rock, and who, like Moses, came only near enough to see but
not to enter the Promised Land. She was washed overboard from the
deck--and to this day the sea is her grave and Cape Cod her monument!
There was Mistress Carver, wife of the first governor, who, when her
husband fell under the stroke of sudden death, followed him first with
heroic grief to the grave, and then, a fortnight after, followed him with
heroic joy up into Heaven! There was Mistress White--the mother of the
first child born to the New England Pilgrims on this continent. And it
was a good omen, sir, that this historic babe was brought into the
world on board the Mayflower between the time of the casting of her
anchor and the landing of her passengers--a kind of amphibious prophecy
that the newborn nation was to have a birthright inheritance over the
sea and over the land. There also was Rose Standish, whose name is a
perpetual June fragrance, to mellow and sweeten those December winds.

Then, after the first vessel with these women, there came other women--
loving hearts drawn from the olden land by those silken threads which
afterwards harden into golden chains. For instance, Governor Bradford,
a lonesome widower, went down to the seabeach, and, facing the waves,
tossed a love letter over the wide ocean into the lap of Alice
Southworth in old England, who caught it up, and read it, and said,
"Yes, I will go." And she went! And it is said that the governor, at
his second wedding, married his first love! Which, according to the New
Theology, furnishes the providential reason why the first Mrs. Bradford
fell overboard!

Now, gentlemen, as you sit to-night in this elegant hall, think of the
houses in which the _Mayflower_ men and women lived in that first
winter! Think of a cabin in the wilderness--where winds whistled--where
wolves howled--where Indians yelled! And yet, within that log house,
burning like a lamp, was the pure flame of Christian faith, love,
patience, fortitude, heroism! As the Star of the East rested over the
rude manger where Christ lay, so--speaking not irreverently--there
rested over the roofs of the Pilgrims a Star of the West--the Star of
Empire; and to-day that empire is the proudest in the world!

And now, to close, let me give you just a bit of good advice. The
cottages of our forefathers had few pictures on the walls, but many
families had a print of "King Charles's Twelve Good Rules," the
eleventh of which was, "Make no long meals." Now King Charles lost his
head, and you will have leave to make a long meal. But when, after your
long meal, you go home in the wee small hours, what do you expect to
find? You will find my toast--"Woman, a beautiful rod!" Now my advice
is, "Kiss the rod!"


ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Reprinted with the author's permission

BY HORACE PORTER

The story of the life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than
reality. It is more like a fable of the ancient days than the story of
a plain American of the nineteenth century. The singular vicissitudes
in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest
which attaches to few men in history. He sprang from that class which
he always alluded to as the "plain people," and never attempted to
disdain them. He believed that the government was made for the people,
not the people for the government. He felt that true Republicanism is a
torch--the more it is shaken in the hands of the people the brighter it
will burn. He was transcendently fit to be the first successful
standard bearer of the progressive, aggressive, invincible Republican
party. He might well have said to those who chanced to sneer at his
humble origin what a marshal of France raised from the ranks said to
the haughty nobles of Vienna boasting of their long line of descent,
when they refused to associate with him: "I am an ancestor; you are
only descendants!" He was never guilty of any posing for effect, any
attitudinizing in public, any mawkish sentimentality, any of that
puppyism so often bred by power, that dogmatism which Johnson said was
only puppyism grown to maturity. He made no claim to knowledge he did
not possess. He felt with Addison that pedantry and learning are like
hypocrisy in religion--the form of knowledge without the power of it.
He had nothing in common with those men of mental malformation who are
educated beyond their intellects.

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