Part 2

Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the _living_ man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the restoration of the science and the art of oratory.

The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong. It was such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw.

There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly born with men and women--as the power of the true poet and the true teacher--yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the later science is persuasive--it has to do mainly with influencing the head and the heart.

There is a law of oratory which does not seem to be understood or recognized by elocution teachers. The plow-boy in a debating society of the country school may feel that natural law, like Daniel Webster, without being conscious that he is following it. But there is a danger of losing this great natural power through injurious cultivation. The powerful speaker is consciously or unconsciously observant at all times of his audience, and he naturally adopts the tones, the gesture, and the language which attract the most attention and leave the most potent influence upon the audience. That is the law of all oratory, whether it applies to the domestic animals, to conversation with our fellows, to debates or addresses, lectures, speeches, sermons, or arguments. Where the orator has not been misdirected or misled by some superficial teacher of elocution, his aim will be first "to win the favorable attention of his audience" and then to strongly impress them with his opening sentence, his appearance, his manners, and his subject. His reputation will have also very much to do with winning this favorable impression at first. The words of the speaker either drive away or attract, and the speaker endeavors at the outset to command the attention of the hearers, whether they be dogs or congregation.

The beginner in oratory who is true to his instincts strives to adopt the methods which he feels will favorably impress those for whom he has a message. In his oration at the funeral of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony disarmed the enemies of Caesar and of himself by opening his oration with, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to _praise_ him." Almost any man or woman can become an orator of power by keeping himself or herself natural while talking.

The second condition of a successful oration is the statements of the important facts or truths. Cicero, the elder Pitt, and Edward Everett held strictly to the statement of all the facts at the outset of their speech. Facts and truths are the most important things in all kinds of oratory; as they are the most difficult to handle, the audience is more likely to listen to them at the opening of the talk, and they must be placed before the hearers clearly and emphatically, before the speaker enters upon the next division of his address.

The third condition of a successful address is the argument, or reasoning which is used to prove the conclusion he wishes his hearers to reach. It is here that logic has its special place; it is at this vital point that many political speakers fail to convince the men they address. After he has thus reasoned, the natural orator makes his appeal, which is the _chief purpose_ of all true oratory. It is here where the orator becomes vehement, here where he shows all the ornament of his talk in appropriate figures of speech. The most effective orators are always those whose hearts are in strong sympathy with humanity, and whose sympathies are always aroused to plead for men. This is the condition that accounts for the eloquence--the power to arouse hearers--which characterizes men like Logan, the American Indian, and which characterizes many of the religious enthusiasts like Peter the Hermit, who have surprised the world and often moved them to mighty deeds.

So long as our government depends upon the votes of the people, just so long must there be a stirring need of men and women orators to teach the principles of government and to keep open to the light of truth the consciences of the thousands and millions whose votes will decide the welfare or the misfortune of our nation. As the speaker must adapt himself and his message to all kinds of people, it is difficult to advise any one in certain terms how to accomplish this. It is another instance of the necessity of cultivating the daily habit of observation, and of being always loyal to our instincts.

While schools and colleges have their uses, they are by no means a necessity for those who will accomplish great things through their oratory. Many a man laden with a wealth of college accomplishment has been an utter failure on the platform. Where reading-matter is as abundant and as cheap as it is in America, the poor boy at work upon the farm or in the factory, with no time but his evenings for study, may get the essentials of education, and by observing those who speak may give himself forms of oratorical expression that will enable him to outshine those with scholarship who have been led into fads.

We must be impressed with a high sense of duty in becoming an orator of any class; we must feel that it is our calling to adhere to the truth always and in all things, to warn our hearers of dangers, and to encourage the good and help those who are struggling to be so. We must have a passion for oratory which shall impel us to vigorous thought and eloquent expression. The greatest oratory is that which is most persuasive. It is not so fully in what an orator says or the vehemence with which he says it that counts, but the practical good that results from it. Many an oration has been elegant enough from its choice diction and labored phraseology, yet it has fallen flat upon the audience.

When a man has been worked into natural passion over his theme, his words will strike root and inspire his hearers into similar passion. It is wonderful how true are our instincts in detecting what comes from the heart and that which is mere words. The greatest orators have been those who have not learned "by rote" what they have spoken. When Lincoln broke away in his celebrated Cooper Institute address, and pictured the word freedom written by the Lord across the skies in rainbow hues, the hearts of his audience stopped beating for the instant. It is foolhardy for any one to presume to speak with no preparation, for those who wish to give themselves to oratory should carefully study the great debaters, learn how they expressed themselves, and then accumulate important truths and facts concerning their subject. But we must not forget that too much study as to nicety of expression may lose something of the mountainous effects of what we wish to state.

When an orator _feels_ his subject, his soul overflows with a thrill indescribable, which is known only to those who have felt it. Genius is lifted free for the moment to fly at will to the mountain heights, and finds supreme delight therein. Everything that is food for the mind is helpful to the orator, whether it come from school or work. But it is an attainment which can be reached by the every-day plain man employed in any every-day occupation. Demosthenes, the greatest orator the world has yet known, found his School of Oratory along the shore talking to the waves. John B. Gough and Henry Clay and both the elder and the younger Pitt gained all their powers by means as humble. The mere study of grammar has never yet made a correct speaker; the mere study of rhetoric has never yet made a correct and powerful writer; and the study of elocution cannot make an orator. Grammar, rhetoric, and elocution may teach him only the laws which govern speech, writing, oratory, and leave him ignorant of the best methods of execution.

During the last hundred years the leading orators of Congress have mainly come from among the humble and the poor, and all the learning they had of their art was got in the schoolhouse, the shop, the fields, and the University of Hard Knocks. It is a calling that seems to be open to every man and woman of fair talent. If you desire to become a platform orator, read the lives of successful orators, and apply to yourself the means which helped them to distinction. But be vigilant not to lose your own individuality, and never strive to be any one but yourself. In no place more than upon the platform does _sham_ mean _shame_; nothing is more transparent.

IV

SELF-HELP

Although Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help" is the first and perhaps the best of the many inspirational books that have been written of late years, it is by far the most serviceable of all to any one who wishes and intends to stand squarely on his own feet and to fight his own battle of life from start to finish. That book is attractive because it is anecdotal of life and character, and because of the interest that all men feel in those who have achieved great things through their own labors, their trials, and their struggles. It abounds with references to men who were forced to be self-helpful, who were born lowly enough, but died among God's gentlemen, and often among the aristocracy of the land, through sheer force of character, labor, and determination. They have left their "footprints on the sands of time" mainly because they were _self-reliant_ and _self-helpful_.

The aids to the royal life are all within, and no life is worthless unless its owner wills it; the fountain of all good is within, and it will bubble up, if we dig.

Doctor Holland used to say that there is a super-abundance of inspiration in America, but a lamentable dearth of perspiration. Aspiration plus perspiration carries men to dizzy heights of success; aspiration minus perspiration often lands them in the gutter.

Self-help is not selfishness. The duty of helping oneself in the highest sense always involves the duty of helping others. The self-helpful are not always the men who have achieved greatest success in what vulgarians call success. That man's life is a success which has attained the end for which he started out--the greatest failure may sometimes be the hugest success through the discipline it has afforded. They tell us that men never fail who die in a worthy cause; that it is nobler to have failed in a noble cause than to have won in a low one; that it is not failure, but low aim, that is wicked. God sows the seed and starts us all out with about the same quantity and the same quality; whether the crop shall be abundant depends upon the environment in which we grow and the way we take care of the field.

The supreme end of each man's life is to take individual care of his own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life--and every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the improvement of it we give ourselves.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, we have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some government or some institution to do for them what they should only do for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win his own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other institutions, and too little in ourselves.

Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any source--they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws--especially the laws which teach men to lean--but they rather consist in helping men to improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself--we may stand him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by governments. There is no man who rides through life so well as the man who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called self-dependence.

Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the manliness of the soul.

The solid foundations of all liberty rest upon individual character, and individual character is the only sure guaranty for social security and national progress. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter by what other name you call it. The gods are always on the side of the man who relies on himself and helps himself; men's arms are long enough to reach stars, if they will only stretch them. It is so contrary to the spirit of our nation to be anything but self-helpful. "The flag of freedom cannot long float over a nation of deadheads; only those who determine to pay their way from cradle to grave have a right to make the journey." Schiller says that the kind of education that perfects the human race is action, conduct, self-culture, self-control. It has been said that the individual is perfected far more by work than by reading, by action more than by study, by character more than by biography; these are courses that are given by the University of Life more completely than in all other institutions known to men.

The great men of science, literature, art, action--those apostles of great thoughts and lords of the great heart--belong to no special rank. They come from colleges, workshops, farms, from poor men's huts and rich men's mansions; but they all began with reliance upon themselves, and with an instinctive feeling that they must help themselves solely in climbing to the work or the station which they had assigned to themselves. Many of God's greatest apostles of thought and feeling and action have come from the humblest stations, but the most insuperable difficulties have not long been obstacles to them. These greatest of difficulties are true men's greatest helpers--they stimulate powers that might have lain dormant all through life, but often have readily yielded to the stout and reliant heart. There is no greater blessing in the world than poverty which is allied to self-reliance and the spirit of self-help. "Poverty is the northwind which lashes men into vikings." Lord Bacon says that men believe too great things of riches, and too little of indomitable perseverance.

Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No inheritance and environments can do for a man what he can do for himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary--started life as weavers. Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the missionary--were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists.

Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In less than four years after he landed in England he became Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been knighted by the king.

In Bavaria he became lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief of staff, minister of war, member of the council of state, knight of Poland, member of the academy of science in three cities, commander-in-chief of the general staff, superintendent of police of Bavaria, and chief of the regency during the sovereign's compulsory absence in 1798. During his ten years' service he made great civil and military reforms and produced such salutary changes in the condition of the people that they erected a monument in his honor in the pleasure-grounds of Munich, which he had made for them. When Munich was attacked by an Austrian army in 1796, he conducted the defense so successfully that he was accorded the highest praise throughout Europe. The Bavarian monarch showed his appreciation by making him a count; he chose the title of Count Rumford as an honor to the birthplace of his wife and child. He ended his days at Paris in literary and scientific studies and in the society of the most learned men of Europe.

The Rumford professorship at Harvard was very liberally endowed by him, and he gave five thousand dollars to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1796.

V

SOME ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN

A life is divine when duty is a joy. The best work we ever do is the work we get pleasure from doing, and the work we are likeliest to enjoy most is the work we are best fitted to do with our talent. There is nothing in the world except marriage that we should be slower in taking upon ourselves than our life-work; therefore, think much, read much, inquire much before you assume any life career.

When you have once decided what is best fitted for you, pursue it ceaselessly and courageously, no matter how far distant it may be, how arduous the labor attending it, or how difficult the ascent. The greater the difficulty surmounted, the more you will value your achievement and the greater power you will have for keeping on with your work after you have reached your goal. Do your utmost to find a friend who is older than you, and consult him freely, and give every man your ear, for the humblest in station and those with the most meager acquirements in other matters may see some few things more clearly than other men, and may be well stored with what you most require. Take each man's advice, but act according to your own judgment. Teachers should be the best advisers of those about to enter upon their life-work, and no service of the schoolmaster or professor can ever be more helpful to the young intrusted to him than that of helping them to choose a career.

The best work real teachers do for their pupils is by no means the teaching of a few minor branches--it is almost always the work he is not paid for, and which nobody outside of those who realize what real education is, seems ever to consider. It is sympathy for their students, getting them to understand the great things that are involved in the process of getting an education, making them realize that true education means growth of all our spiritual faculties--head and heart and will, and that what we get from textbooks is the very least part of an education. It is helping them to understand that knowledge got from books and from schoolmasters is always a menace to a man whose spiritual faculties of head, heart, and will have not been thoroughly disciplined. It is wise counsel in choosing a life career. Instead of looking upon this side of the work as divine, instead of being wise counselors and friendly guides during this great transitional stage from youth to manhood, teachers can be far more interested in their individual concerns or in what they call "research-work"--the research-work may give some temporary glory to themselves, and give some little advertisement to the institutions that employ them; but the supreme duty they owe to their students, to God, and to humanity is to do their utmost to make full men, and worthy and successful men, out of the youths whose education they have taken upon themselves. No traitor is such a traitor to his country and to the whole world as the man who is unfaithful to this sacred trust. Once again, find some sincere and prudent elder counselor, and turn to him in all your difficulties.