The Art of Public Speaking
not come here to-day to seek such remuneration; if it were not
that, by your verdict, you may prevent those little innocent
defrauded wretches from becoming wandering beggars, as well as
orphans on the face of this earth. Oh, I know I need not ask
this verdict from your mercy; I need not extort it from your
compassion; I will receive it from your justice. I do conjure
you, not as fathers, but as husbands:--not as husbands, but as
citizens:--not as citizens, but as men:--not as men, but as
Christians:--by all your obligations, public, private, moral,
and religious; by the hearth profaned; by the home desolated; by
the canons of the living God foully spurned;--save, oh: save
your firesides from the contagion, your country from the crime,
and perhaps thousands, yet unborn, from the shame, and sin, and
sorrow of this example!
--CHARLES PHILLIPS, _Appeal to the jury in behalf of Guthrie._
So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made
by slaves and called it freedom, from the men in bell-crown hats
who led Hester Prynne to her shame and called it religion, to
that Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong
with reason and truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal
from the patriarchs of New England to the poets of New England;
from Endicott to Lowell; from Winthrop to Longfellow; from
Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name and by the rights of
that common citizenship--of that common origin, back of both the
Puritan and the Cavalier, to which all of us owe our being. Let
the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its martyrs, not by
its savage hatreds, darkened alike by kingcraft and
priestcraft--let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present
and the future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the
lessons they teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to
see, the light to reveal. Blessed be tolerance, sitting ever on
the right hand of God to guide the way with loving word, as
blessed be all that brings us nearer the goal of true religion,
true republicanism, and true patriotism, distrust of watchwords
and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our country and
ourselves. It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf
Whittier, who cried:
Dear God and Father of us all,
Forgive our faith in cruel lies,
Forgive the blindness that denies.
Cast down our idols--overturn
Our Bloody altars--make us see
Thyself in Thy humanity!
--HENRY WATTERSON, _Puritan and Cavalier_.
Goethe, on being reproached for not having written war songs against
the French, replied, "In my poetry I have never shammed. How could I
have written songs of hate without hatred?" Neither is it possible
to plead with full efficiency for a cause for which you do not feel
deeply. Feeling is contagious as belief is contagious. The speaker
who pleads with real feeling for his own convictions will instill
his feelings into his listeners. Sincerity, force, enthusiasm, and
above all, feeling--these are the qualities that move multitudes
and make appeals irresistible. They are of far greater importance
than technical principles of delivery, grace of gesture, or polished
enunciation--important as all these elements must doubtless be
considered. _Base_ your appeal on reason, but do not end in the
basement--let the building rise, full of deep emotion and noble
persuasion.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. (_a_) What elements of appeal do you find in the following? (_b_) Is it
too florid? (_c_) Is this style equally powerful today? (_d_) Are the
sentences too long and involved for clearness and force?
Oh, gentlemen, am I this day only the counsel of my client? No,
no; I am the advocate of humanity--of yourselves--your
homes--your wives--your families--your little children. I am
glad that this case exhibits such atrocity; unmarked as it is by
any mitigatory feature, it may stop the frightful advance of
this calamity; it will be met now, and marked with vengeance. If
it be not, farewell to the virtues of your country; farewell to
all confidence between man and man; farewell to that
unsuspicious and reciprocal tenderness, without which marriage
is but a consecrated curse. If oaths are to be violated, laws
disregarded, friendship betrayed, humanity trampled, national
and individual honor stained, and if a jury of fathers and of
husbands will give such miscreancy a passport to their homes,
and wives, and daughters,--farewell to all that yet remains of
Ireland! But I will not cast such a doubt upon the character of
my country. Against the sneer of the foe, and the skepticism of
the foreigner, I will still point to the domestic virtues, that
no perfidy could barter, and no bribery can purchase, that with
a Roman usage, at once embellish and consecrate households,
giving to the society of the hearth all the purity of the altar;
that lingering alike in the palace and the cottage, are still to
be found scattered over this land--the relic of what she
was--the source perhaps of what she may be--the lone, the
stately, and magnificent memorials, that rearing their majesty
amid surrounding ruins, serve at once as the landmarks of the
departed glory, and the models by which the future may be
erected.
Preserve those virtues with a vestal fidelity; mark this day, by
your verdict, your horror of their profanation; and believe me,
when the hand which records that verdict shall be dust, and the
tongue that asks it, traceless in the grave, many a happy home
will bless its consequences, and many a mother teach her little
child to hate the impious treason of adultery.
--CHARLES PHILLIPS.
2. Analyze and criticise the forms of appeal used in the selections from
Hoar, Story, and Kipling.
3. What is the type of persuasion used by Senator Thurston (page 50)?
4. Cite two examples each, from selections in this volume, in which
speakers sought to be persuasive by securing the hearers' (_a_) sympathy
for themselves; (_b_) sympathy with their subjects; (_c_) self-pity.
5. Make a short address using persuasion.
6. What other methods of persuasion than those here mentioned can you
name?
7. Is it easier to persuade men to change their course of conduct than
to persuade them to continue in a given course? Give examples to support
your belief.
8. In how far are we justified in making an appeal to self-interest in
order to lead men to adopt a given course?
9. Does the merit of the course have any bearing on the merit of the
methods used?
10. Illustrate an unworthy method of using persuasion.
11. Deliver a short speech on the value of skill in persuasion.
12. Does effective persuasion always produce conviction?
13. Does conviction always result in action?
14. Is it fair for counsel to appeal to the emotions of a jury in a
murder trial?
15. Ought the judge use persuasion in making his charge?
16. Say how self-consciousness may hinder the power of persuasion in a
speaker.
17. Is emotion without words ever persuasive? If so, illustrate.
18. Might gestures without words be persuasive? If so, illustrate.
19. Has posture in a speaker anything to do with persuasion? Discuss.
20. Has voice? Discuss.
21. Has manner? Discuss.
22. What effect does personal magnetism have in producing conviction?
23. Discuss the relation of persuasion to (_a_) description; (_b_)
narration; (_c_) exposition; (_d_) pure reason.
24. What is the effect of over-persuasion?
25. Make a short speech on the effect of the constant use of persuasion
on the sincerity of the speaker himself.
26. Show by example how a general statement is not as persuasive as a
concrete example illustrating the point being discussed.
27. Show by example how brevity is of value in persuasion.
28. Discuss the importance of avoiding an antagonistic attitude in
persuasion.
29. What is the most persuasive passage you have found in the selections
of this volume. On what do you base your decision?
30. Cite a persuasive passage from some other source. Read or recite it
aloud.
31. Make a list of the emotional bases of appeal, grading them from low
to high, according to your estimate.
32. Would circumstances make any difference in such grading? If so, give
examples.
33. Deliver a short, passionate appeal to a jury, pleading for justice
to a poor widow.
34. Deliver a short appeal to men to give up some evil way.
35. Criticise the structure of the sentence beginning with the last line
of page 296.
CHAPTER XXV
INFLUENCING THE CROWD
Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching
the imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this
present generation are less successful in getting people to want
goodness than business men are in getting them to want motorcars,
hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a class are more
close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned down
harder to the art of touching the imaginations of the crowds.
--GERALD STANLEY LEE, _Crowds_.
In the early part of July, 1914, a collection of Frenchmen in Paris, or
Germans in Berlin, was not a crowd in a psychological sense. Each
individual had his own special interests and needs, and there was no
powerful common idea to unify them. A group then represented only a
collection of individuals. A month later, any collection of Frenchmen or
Germans formed a crowd: Patriotism, hate, a common fear, a pervasive
grief, had unified the individuals.
The psychology of the crowd is far different from the psychology of the
personal members that compose it. The crowd is a distinct entity.
Individuals restrain and subdue many of their impulses at the dictates
of reason. The crowd never reasons. It only feels. As persons there is a
sense of responsibility attached to our actions which checks many of our
incitements, but the sense of responsibility is lost in the crowd
because of its numbers. The crowd is exceedingly suggestible and will
act upon the wildest and most extreme ideas. The crowd-mind is
primitive and will cheer plans and perform actions which its members
would utterly repudiate.
A mob is only a highly-wrought crowd. Ruskin's description is fitting:
"You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may be--usually are--on
the whole, generous and right, but it has no foundation for them, no
hold of them. You may tease or tickle it into anything at your pleasure.
It thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a
cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild
about, when the fit is on, nothing so great but it will forget in an
hour when the fit is past."[28]
History will show us how the crowd-mind works. The medieval mind was not
given to reasoning; the medieval man attached great weight to the
utterance of authority; his religion touched chiefly the emotions. These
conditions provided a rich soil for the propagation of the crowd-mind
when, in the eleventh century, flagellation, a voluntary self-scourging,
was preached by the monks. Substituting flagellation for reciting
penitential psalms was advocated by the reformers. A scale was drawn up,
making one thousand strokes equivalent to ten psalms, or fifteen
thousand to the entire psalter. This craze spread by leaps--and crowds.
Flagellant fraternities sprang up. Priests carrying banners led through
the streets great processions reciting prayers and whipping their bloody
bodies with leathern thongs fitted with four iron points. Pope Clement