The Art of Public Speaking
He had made up his mind that the merchants and burghers had still much
hidden gold, and if he killed their bravest and best, terror would fall
upon all alike, and that the gold he needed would be forthcoming. That
all the people might witness the scene, he took his prisoners to
Brussels and decided to behead them in the public square. In the evening
Egmont received the notice that his head would be chopped off the next
day. A scaffold was erected in the public square. That evening he wrote
a letter that is a marvel of restraint.
"Sire--I have learned this evening the sentence which your majesty has
been pleased to pronounce upon me. Although I have never had a thought,
and believe myself never to have done a deed, which would tend to the
prejudice of your service, or to the detriment of true religion,
nevertheless I take patience to bear that which it has pleased the good
God to permit. Therefore, I pray your majesty to have compassion on my
poor wife, my children and my servants, having regard to my past
service. In which hope I now commend myself to the mercy of God. From
Brussels, ready to die, this 5th of June, 1568.
"LAMORAL D' EGMONT."
Thus died a man who did as much probably for Holland as John Eliot for
England, or Lafayette for France, or Samuel Adams for this young
republic.
THE WOE OF BELGIUM
And now out of all this glorious past comes the woe of Belgium.
Desolation has come like the whirlwind, and destruction like a tornado.
But ninety days ago and Belgium was a hive of industry, and in the
fields were heard the harvest songs. Suddenly, Germany struck Belgium.
The whole world has but one voice, "Belgium has innocent hands." She was
led like a lamb to the slaughter. When the lover of Germany is asked to
explain Germany's breaking of her solemn treaty upon the neutrality of
Belgium, the German stands dumb and speechless. Merchants honor their
written obligations. True citizens consider their word as good as their
bond; Germany gave treaty, and in the presence of God and the civilized
world, entered into a solemn covenant with Belgium. To the end of time,
the German must expect this taunt, "as worthless as a German treaty."
Scarcely less black the two or three known examples of cruelty wrought
upon nonresisting Belgians. In Brooklyn lives a Belgian woman. She
planned to return home in late July to visit a father who had suffered
paralysis, an aged mother and a sister who nursed both. When the Germans
decided to burn that village in Eastern Belgium, they did not wish to
burn alive this old and helpless man, so they bayonetted to death the
old man and woman, and the daughter that nursed them.
Let us judge not, that we be not judged. This is the one example of
atrocity that you and I might be able personally to prove. But every
loyal German in the country can make answer: "These soldiers were drunk
with wine and blood. Such an atrocity misrepresents Germany and her
soldiers. The breaking of Germany's treaty with Belgium represents the
dishonor of a military ring, and not the perfidy of 68,000,000 of
people. We ask that judgment be postponed until all the facts are in."
But, meanwhile, the man who loves his fellows, at midnight in his dreams
walks across the fields of broken Belgium. All through the night air
there comes the sob of Rachel, weeping for her children, because they
are not. In moods of bitterness, of doubt and despair the heart cries
out, "How could a just God permit such cruelty upon innocent Belgium?"
No man knows. "Clouds and darkness are round about God's throne." The
spirit of evil caused this war, but the Spirit of God may bring good out
of it, just as the summer can repair the ravages of winter. Meanwhile
the heart bleeds for Belgium. For Brussels, the third most beautiful
city in Europe! For Louvain, once rich with its libraries, cathedrals,
statues, paintings, missals, manuscripts--now a ruin. Alas! for the
ruined harvests and the smoking villages! Alas, for the Cathedral that
is a heap, and the library that is a ruin. Where the angel of happiness
was there stalk Famine and Death. Gone, the Land of Grotius! Perished
the paintings of Rubens! Ruined is Louvain. Where the wheat waved, now
the hillsides are billowy with graves. But let us believe that God
reigns. Perchance Belgium is slain like the Saviour, that militarism may
die like Satan. Without shedding of innocent blood there is no remission
of sins through tyranny and greed. There is no wine without the crushing
of the grapes from the tree of life. Soon Liberty, God's dear child,
will stand within the scene and comfort the desolate. Falling upon the
great world's altar stairs, in this hour when wisdom is ignorance, and
the strongest man clutches at dust and straw, let us believe with faith
victorious over tears, that some time God will gather broken-hearted
little Belgium into His arms and comfort her as a Father comforteth his
well-beloved child.
_HENRY WATTERSON_
THE NEW AMERICANISM
(Abridged)
Eight years ago tonight, there stood where I am standing now a young
Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the "significance" of his
presence here, and, in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall,
appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.
He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was
fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been
appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men,
and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the
dove from the ark.
Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr.
Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's
actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of
that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this
judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from
gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches
deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely
tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs this
nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and
mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled
from oppression. Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had
their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost
arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and
great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human
blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that
tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes
in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.
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-crowned 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!"
_JOHN MORLEY_
FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS
(Abridged)
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 3, 1904.
What is so hard as a just estimate of the events of our own time? It is
only now, a century and a half later, that we really perceive that a
writer has something to say for himself when he calls Wolfe's exploit at
Quebec the turning point in modern history. And to-day it is hard to
imagine any rational standard that would not make the American
Revolution--an insurrection of thirteen little colonies, with a
population of 3,000,000 scattered in a distant wilderness among
savages--a mightier event in many of its aspects than the volcanic
convulsion in France. Again, the upbuilding of your great West on this
continent is reckoned by some the most important world movement of the
last hundred years. But is it more important than the amazing, imposing
and perhaps disquieting apparition of Japan? One authority insists that
when Russia descended into the Far East and pushed her frontier on the
Pacific to the forty-third degree of latitude that was one of the most
far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of
Europe--all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant.
Who can say? Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take
the full historic measures of Luther, Calvin, Knox; the measure of
Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation. The
center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world
perpetually changing. But we are now far enough off to discern how
stupendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one
foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a
span of less than a score of years, planted the foundations of the
American Republic.
What Forbes's stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than
I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg in material production--iron, steel,
coke, glass, and all the rest of it--can only be told in colossal
figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures
of astronomical distance or geologic time. It is not quite clear that
all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful
scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would
have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in
the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said,
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the
liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as
the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a
country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per cent.
of our population as dwellers in towns. With you, I read that only 25
per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons. If
Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark. Let us hope that he was
wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view.
Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.
That great man--a name in the forefront among the practical
intelligences of human history--once told a friend that when he dwelt
upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and
the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement
always begets another, he felt assured that the future progress of the
race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been. He was never