personally among us, while he was yet walking in his strength in the paths or ascending the heights of active public life, or standing upon them, and so many of the good and wise, so many of the wisest and best of our country, from all parts of it, thought he had title to the great office of our system, and would have had him formally presented for it, it was fit that those who loved and honored him should publicly-with effort, with passion, with argument, with contention recall the series of his services, his life of elevated labors, finished and unfinished, display his large qualities of character and mind, and compare him, somewhat, in all these things, with the great men, his competitors for the great prize. Then was there a battle to be fought, and it was needful

to fight it.

And so, again, in a later day, while our hearts were yet bleeding with the sense of recent loss, and he lay newly dead in his chamber, and the bells were tolling, and his grave was open, and the sunlight of an autumn day was falling on that long funeral train, I do not say it was fit only, it was unavoidable, that we all, in some choked utterance and some imperfect, sincere expression, should, if we could not praise the patriot, lament the man.

But these times have gone by. The race of honor and duty is for him all run. The high endeavor is made, and it is finished. The monument is builded. He is entered into his glory. The day of hope, of pride, of grief, has been followed by the long rest; and the sentiments of grief, pride, and hope, are all merged in the sentiment of calm and implicit veneration. We have buried him in our hearts. That is enough to say. Our estimation of him is part of our creed. We have no argument to make or hear upon it. We enter into no dispute about him. We permit no longer any man to question us as to what he was, what he had done, how much we loved him, how much the country loved him, and how well he deserved it. We admire, we love, and we are still. Be this enough for us to say.

Is it not enough that we just stand silent on the deck of the bark fast flying from the shore, and turn and see, as the line of coast disappears, and the headlands and hills and all the land go down, and the islands are swallowed up, the great mountain standing there in its strength and majesty, supreme and still— to

see how it swells away up from the subject and fading vale? to see that, though clouds and tempests, and the noise of waves, and the yelping of curs, may be at its feet, eternal sunshine has settled upon its head?

State Rights and Individual Rights. Municipal Misrule.
Uphold the Constitution.

In this country every Presidential campaign and indeed every local election involving important issues gives occasion to the politician to endeavor by public speeches to influence votes and increase his constituency or that of his favorite candidate. Owing to an earlyday frontier practice of speaking from the stumps of trees, such speakers are still commonly said to "take the stump." In England and Ireland they "mount the hustings.

Doubtless this method of electioneering is much abused; but we may not decry it on that account. The addresses are made directly to the voters and often to a class of voters who do not read much and who need enlightenment on the issues of the day. The difficulty lies in the fact that nearly all of these great questions have two sides, each with its sincere advocates,

and a speaker is apt to be misled by his enthusiasm to make out a good case and unduly influence votes by representing his side in a too favorable light. But nevertheless we indulge such championship even to the extent of partisanship, feeling that full discussion is better than none at all and trusting that in the long run "ever the right comes uppermost, and ever is justice done."

With purely extemporaneous speaking we have nothing to do except in so far as the practice of writing speeches may assist in the development of an oratorical style. For speeches — even after-dinner speeches, even stump speeches are written or prepared beforehand, the great majority of them. A really good extemporaneous speech is rare, for it requires the happy combination of a rare man and a rare occasion. Given this combination, you have an ideal address.

Right here we get a clew to the secret of writing a successful oration we must make it conform as nearly as possible to our ideal of an extemporaneous one. That there should be certain differences between written discourse and spoken discourse, that is, between that which is intended to be read and that which is intended to be heard, few will deny. In delivering an address you will have to face an audience, look people in the eye, hold their attention, play on their feelings, endure their displeasure or receive their applause. In preparing the address beforehand all this should be borne in mind. Imagine as vividly as you can that you have your audience before you; do not lose sight of it for a moment; write to it as you will have to talk to it; use terms of direct address-gentlemen, friends, fellowcitizens wherever they seem natural and not over

formal; be genial, frank, gracious yet earnest, familiar yet dignified. The advantages of personal directness of address, of getting so close to your audience that they will almost feel as if you held them by the hand, cannot be over-estimated. One of the most telling stump-speeches the present writer ever heard was addressed almost throughout to a particular person in the audience who was a good type of the class whom the speaker wished to reach. He proceeded in about this style:

You know how it is, sir- you, sir, sitting there in the fourth row of seats on the right of the aisle. You will remember that just four years ago this fall I was driving through the country here and staid over night with you. You remember how you were disposed to complain then because you had not realized enough on your abundant wheat harvest to pay for the machinery you had bought that year and because you couldn't see how the corn-crop was going to clothe your family through the winter. I asked you how you were voting and you said that had nothing to do with the matter. And then I said that if you thought that had nothing to do with the matter you surely could not see any harm in making the experiment of voting the other way and of getting a hundred other farmers to make the experiment with you. Did you make the experiment? I am afraid not. Certain it is that the hundred others did not, for when returns from the district came in you had rolled up the same old majority. And what is the result? Your receipts are just as far from covering your expenditures to-day as they were four years ago to-day. Deny it if you can.

EXERCISE LXII.

ORATORY.—THE BAR.

Eloquence is oratory at its best; it is difficult to define it more accurately than that.

True eloquence

does not lie in words alone; nor in the speaker alone; nor yet in the hearer or the occasion. Rather it seems to lie in all of these. For the same words uttered by the same man will seem sublime at one time and ridiculous at another, or will ring eloquent in the ears of one man, bombastic in the ears of another. When a man's words move and stir us to the very depths of our being, when they make us forget ourselves completely, so that we are ready to laugh and weep, even to rise and follow, at his command, we say that man is eloquent. But we do not analyze the spell he casts over us nor attempt to wrest from him the whole secret of his power.

But if we do not know just what eloquence is, we know some things that it is not. We know for one thing that it is not grandiloquence. Long, sonorous words and lofty, high-sounding phrases are no necessary part of it; they are rather apt to be fatal to it. There may be more eloquence in one fitly spoken word, nay in silence itself, than in the most ingenious rhetoric. Read the twentieth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and feel the effect of one word which Jesus utters : Jesus saith unto her, Mary. And can anything be more simple and more sublime than the prayer from the same lips as the rabble reviled him gathered about the cross, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Strained figures are as fatal to eloquence as fantastic words. It may be questioned whether a deliberate figure of speech is ever found in passages where eloquence takes its highest flight. Indeed, violence of any kind, in words as well as in utterance and gesture, is to be sedulously avoided; ranting and spread-eagleism find favor only with the indiscriminating few. This does