The Art of Public Speaking
that "his presence would set the church bells ringing, and give
schoolboys a holiday, would bring children from school and old men from
the chimney-corner, to gaze on him ere he died." The great and
unavailing lamentations first revealed the deep place he had in the
hearts of his countrymen.
You are now to add to this his extraordinary power of influencing the
convictions of others by speech, and you have completed the survey of
the means of his greatness. And here, again I begin by admiring an
aggregate made up of excellences and triumphs, ordinarily deemed
incompatible. He spoke with consummate ability to the bench, and yet
exactly as, according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, the
bench ought to be addressed. He spoke with consummate ability to the
jury, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon, that totally
different tribunal ought to be addressed. In the halls of Congress,
before the people assembled for political discussion in masses, before
audiences smaller and more select, assembled for some solemn
commemoration of the past or of the dead--in each of these, again, his
speech, of the first form of ability, was exactly adapted, also, to the
critical properties of the place; each achieved, when delivered, the
most instant and specific success of eloquence--some of them in a
splendid and remarkable degree; and yet, stranger still, when reduced to
writing, as they fell from his lips, they compose a body of reading in
many volumes--solid, clear, rich, and full of harmony--a classical and
permanent political literature.
And yet all these modes of his eloquence, exactly adapted each to its
stage and its end, were stamped with his image and superscription,
identified by characteristics incapable to be counterfeited and
impossible to be mistaken. The same high power of reason, intent in
every one to explore and display some truth; some truth of judicial, or
historical, or biographical fact; some truth of law, deduced by
construction, perhaps, or by illation; some truth of policy, for want
whereof a nation, generations, may be the worse--reason seeking and
unfolding truth; the same tone, in all, of deep earnestness, expressive
of strong desire that what he felt to be important should be accepted as
true, and spring up to action; the same transparent, plain, forcible,
and direct speech, conveying his exact thought to the mind--not
something less or more; the same sovereignty of form, of brow, and eye,
and tone, and manner--everywhere the intellectual king of men, standing
before you--that same marvelousness of qualities and results, residing,
I know not where, in words, in pictures, in the ordering of ideas,
infelicities indescribable, by means whereof, coming from his tongue,
all things seemed mended--truth seemed more true, probability more
plausible, greatness more grand, goodness more awful, every affection
more tender than when coming from other tongues--these are, in all, his
eloquence.
But sometimes it became individualized and discriminated even from
itself; sometimes place and circumstances, great interests at stake, a
stage, an audience fitted for the highest historic action, a crisis,
personal or national, upon him, stirred the depths of that emotional
nature, as the anger of the goddess stirs the sea on which the great
epic is beginning; strong passions themselves kindled to intensity,
quickened every faculty to a new life; the stimulated associations of
ideas brought all treasures of thought and knowledge within command; the
spell, which often held his imagination fast, dissolved, and she arose
and gave him to choose of her urn of gold; earnestness became vehemence,
the simple, perspicuous, measured and direct language became a headlong,
full, and burning tide of speech; the discourse of reason, wisdom,
gravity, and beauty changed to that superhuman, that rarest consummate
eloquence--grand, rapid, pathetic, terrible; the _aliquid immensum
infinitumque_ that Cicero might have recognized; the master triumph of
man in the rarest opportunity of his noble power.
Such elevation above himself, in congressional debate, was most
uncommon. Some such there were in the great discussions of executive
power following the removal of the deposits, which they who heard them
will never forget, and some which rest in the tradition of hearers only.
But there were other fields of oratory on which, under the influence of
more uncommon springs of inspiration, he exemplified, in still other
forms, an eloquence in which I do not know that he has had a superior
among men. Addressing masses by tens of thousands in the open air, on
the urgent political questions of the day, or designed to lead the
meditations of an hour devoted to the remembrance of some national era,
or of some incident marking the progress of the nation, and lifting him
up to a view of what is, and what is past, and some indistinct
revelation of the glory that lies in the future, or of some great
historical name, just borne by the nation to his tomb--we have learned
that then and there, at the base of Bunker Hill, before the corner-stone
was laid, and again when from the finished column the centuries looked
on him; in Faneuil Hall, mourning for those with whose spoken or written
eloquence of freedom its arches had so often resounded; on the Rock of
Plymouth; before the Capitol, of which there shall not be one stone left
on another before his memory shall have ceased to live--in such scenes,
unfettered by the laws of forensic or parliamentary debate, multitudes
uncounted lifting up their eyes to him; some great historical scenes of
America around; all symbols of her glory and art and power and fortune
there; voices of the past, not unheard; shapes beckoning from the
future, not unseen--sometimes that mighty intellect, borne upward to a
height and kindled to an illumination which we shall see no more,
wrought out, as it were, in an instant a picture of vision, warning,
prediction; the progress of the nation; the contrasts of its eras; the
heroic deaths; the motives to patriotism; the maxims and arts imperial
by which the glory has been gathered and may be heightened--wrought out,
in an instant, a picture to fade only when all record of our mind shall
die.
In looking over the public remains of his oratory, it is striking to
remark how, even in that most sober and massive understanding and
nature, you see gathered and expressed the characteristic sentiments and
the passing time of our America. It is the strong old oak which ascends
before you; yet our soil, our heaven, are attested in it as perfectly as
if it were a flower that could grow in no other climate and in no other
hour of the year or day. Let me instance in one thing only. It is a
peculiarity of some schools of eloquence that they embody and utter,
not merely the individual genius and character of the speaker, but a
national consciousness--a national era, a mood, a hope, a dread, a
despair--in which you listen to the spoken history of the time. There is
an eloquence of an expiring nation, such as seems to sadden the glorious
speech of Demosthenes; such as breathes grand and gloomy from visions of
the prophets of the last days of Israel and Judah; such as gave a spell
to the expression of Grattan and of Kossuth--the sweetest, most
mournful, most awful of the words which man may utter, or which man may
hear--the eloquence of a perishing nation.
There is another eloquence, in which the national consciousness of a
young or renewed and vast strength, of trust in a dazzling certain and
limitless future, an inward glorying in victories yet to be won, sounds
out as by voice of clarion, challenging to contest for the highest prize
of earth; such as that in which the leader of Israel in its first days
holds up to the new nation the Land of Promise; such as that which in
the well-imagined speeches scattered by Livy over the history of the
"majestic series of victories" speaks the Roman consciousness of growing
aggrandizement which should subject the world; such as that through
which, at the tribunes of her revolution, in the bulletins of her rising
soldiers, France told to the world her dream of glory.
And of this kind somewhat is ours--cheerful, hopeful, trusting, as
befits youth and spring; the eloquence of a state beginning to ascend to
the first class of power, eminence, and consideration, and conscious of
itself. It is to no purpose that they tell you it is in bad taste; that
it partakes of arrogance and vanity; that a true national good breeding
would not know, or seem to know, whether the nation is old or young;
whether the tides of being are in their flow or ebb; whether these
coursers of the sun are sinking slowly to rest, wearied with a journey
of a thousand years, or just bounding from the Orient unbreathed. Higher
laws than those of taste determine the consciousness of nations. Higher
laws than those of taste determine the general forms of the expression
of that consciousness. Let the downward age of America find its orators
and poets and artists to erect its spirit, or grace and soothe its
dying; be it ours to go up with Webster to the Rock, the Monument, the
Capitol, and bid "the distant generations hail!"
Until the seventh day of March, 1850, I think it would have been
accorded to him by an almost universal acclaim, as general and as
expressive of profound and intelligent conviction and of enthusiasm,
love, and trust, as ever saluted conspicuous statesmanship, tried by
many crises of affairs in a great nation, agitated ever by parties, and
wholly free.
_ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE_
PASS PROSPERITY AROUND
Delivered as Temporary Chairman of Progressive National Convention,
Chicago, Ill., June, 1911.
We stand for a nobler America. We stand for an undivided Nation. We
stand for a broader liberty, a fuller justice. We stand for a social
brotherhood as against savage individualism. We stand for an intelligent
cooeperation instead of a reckless competition. We stand for mutual
helpfulness instead of mutual hatred. We stand for equal rights as a
fact of life instead of a catch-word of politics. We stand for the rule
of the people as a practical truth instead of a meaningless pretense. We
stand for a representative government that represents the people. We
battle for the actual rights of man.
To carry out our principles we have a plain program of constructive
reform. We mean to tear down only that which is wrong and out of date;
and where we tear down we mean to build what is right and fitted to the
times. We harken to the call of the present. We mean to make laws fit
conditions as they are and meet the needs of the people who are on earth
to-day. That we may do this we found a party through which all who
believe with us can work with us; or, rather, we declare our allegiance
to the party which the people themselves have founded.
For this party comes from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of
the people's hard necessities. It has the vitality of the people's
strong convictions. The people have work to be done and our party is
here to do that work. Abuse will only strengthen it, ridicule only
hasten its growth, falsehood only speed its victory. For years this
party has been forming. Parties exist for the people; not the people for
parties. Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work
of the parties instead of the parties doing the work of the people--and
the politicians own the parties. The people vote for one party and find
their hopes turned to ashes on their lips; and then to punish that
party, they vote for the other party. So it is that partisan victories
have come to be merely the people's vengeance; and always the secret
powers have played their game.
Like other free people, most of us Americans are progressive or