the general has sufficient love of fight to turn the scale, no battle will ever take place. Whether this would be an intolerable calamity is another question, though Kinglake clearly thinks that it would. Be this as it may, there are always so many good reasons for not making a speech, that, unless a speaker has a real desire to make it, the thing never will be done; and nothing so creates and intensifies this desire as an earnest purpose. Some people speak from loquacity or from habit; I knew men in the Massachusetts Legislature who could not go by a bill to regulate the breadth of wagon wheels, without being inspired with a "little amendment"; but, after all, the crotchet of the little amendment was what propelled the speech, so that even these men talked under the pressure of something that they had very much at heart. As a general rule, it may be assumed that most of the speeches on a given question-in a town meeting for instance-are by those who speak because they "have a message to deliver," as Carlyle would say. And that is the oratory most effective. The words which almost always command most attention in any legislative body are those coming from men who have never before opened their lips there, but who have some matter that thoroughly possesses them-usually a local question, or a question of their particular trade or business-on which they utter themselves with a force such as the members who pass for "orators" can rarely bring to bear. It is almost invariable that such a man, being modest, goes first to some more conspicuous member, and tries to get him to make the speech, and he is almost always told that it will be tenfold more effective if he makes it himself. Pole, in his new rules for whist playing, says that only two things can excuse a man from following his partner's lead of trumps-sudden illness, or the fact that he has not a single trump in his hand. So the only thing that can really excuse a man for transferring to anybody else the task of making a speech on a subject that he has mastered, is either sudden illness, or the fact that he has changed his opinion, and has no speech to make. The first rule for public speaking, therefore, is, Have something that you desire very much to say.

The second rule is, Always speak in a natural key, and in a conversational manner. The days of pompous and stilted elo

quence are gone by, and it was perhaps Wendell Phillips more than anybody else who put an end to it in this country, and substituted a simpler style. I remember a striking instance of this change of manner at a Harvard Commencement dinner. The late George S. Hillard of Boston, a man of much local fame, now rapidly fading, was in my youth considered almost the model orator for such an occasion-acute, well trained, skillful, and in his way even persuasive. For many years, however, he absented himself, partly through political antagonism, from the college gatherings. At last, some ten years ago, he reappeared, and gave one of his old and highly elaborated speeches. After he had sat down, amid courteous but not ardent applause, my classmate, the late Dr. Edward H. Clarke, who sat by me, said, in a whisper, "Is the change in Hillard, or in me? I remember the time when that speech would have seemed to me the perfection of oratory. Now it utterly fails to move me." Curiously enough, I had been myself making the same reflection; and Dr. Clarke himself, being afterward called upon, made a plain, telling, straightforward statement about the condition and needs of the medical school, which took a hearty hold of those present, although the "classic orator" had failed to reach them. There is no question that within thirty years our American public speaking has been pitched upon a far more natural key.

But how to reach that easy tone is the serious question. Many a man has risen with the best intention to speak naturally, and has been swept away into a false or constrained manner before he has fairly said, "Mr. President and gentlemen." It is hard, therefore, to answer the question how to make sure of the desired attitude. The best way, of course, is to be natural without effort, if one only could. In that delightful book about children by Mrs. Diaz, called "William Henry's Letters," the simple-hearted boy cannot quite comprehend the necessity of being sent to dancing school "in order to know how to enter a room," as his fastidious aunts have advised. "I told her I didn't see anything so very hard about entering a room. I told 'em, 'Walk right in!"" But the dancing school is meant to reassure boys less frank than William Henry, and so all sug

gestions as to beginning a speech are for those to whom it is not easy to walk right in.

Tennyson says of manners:

Kind nature is the best, those manners next
That fit us like a nature second-hand,

Which are indeed the manners of the great.

If people are shy and awkward and conscious about their speeches, how shall they gain an easy and unconstrained bearing? That is, how shall they begin their speeches in that way? --for after the beginning, it is not so hard to go on.

There is one very simple method-as simple as to swallow a mouthful of water slowly to cure one's hiccough-and yet one which I have seldom known to fail. Suppose the occasion to be a public dinner. You have somebody by your side to whom you have been talking. To him your manner was undoubtedly natural; and if you can only carry along into your public speech that conversational flavor of your private talk, the battle is gained. How, then, to achieve that result? In this easy way: Express to your neighbor conversationally the thought, whatever it is, with which you mean to begin your public speech. Then, when you rise to speak, say merely what will be perfectly true, "I was just saying to the gentleman who sits beside me, that"-and then you repeat your remark over again. You thus make the last words of your private talk the first words of your public address, and the conversational manner is secured. This suggestion originated, I believe, with a man of inexhaustible fertility in public speech, Rev. E. E. Hale. I have often availed myself of it, and have often been thanked by others for suggesting it to them.

In the third place, Never carry a scrap of paper before an audience. If you read your address altogether, that is very different; and some orators, especially the French, produce remarkable effects by speaking from manuscript. It is the combination that injures. So long as a man is absolutely without notes, he is not merely thrown on his own resources, but his hearers see and know that he is; their sympathy goes along with him; they wish him to go triumphantly through. But if they once see that he is partly relying on the stilts and

leading strings of his memoranda, their sympathy languishes. It is like the difference between a man who walks a tight-rope boldly, trusting wholly to his balance-pole, and the man who is looking about every moment for something by which to steady himself. What is the aim of your notes? You fear that without them you may lose your thread, or your logical connection, or some valuable fact or illustration. But you may be sure that neither thread nor logic, nor argument is so important to the audience as that they should be kept in entire sympathy with yourself, that the magnetic contact, or whatever we call it, should be unbroken. The chances are that nobody will miss what you leave out, if you forget anything; but you will lose much if you forego the continuous and confiding attention given to a speaker who is absolutely free.

The late Judge B. R. Curtis once lost a case in court of which he had felt very sure-one in which John P. Hale of New Hampshire, a man not to be compared with him as a lawyer, was his successful antagonist. When asked the reason, he said, "It was very curious: I had all the law and all the evidence, but that fellow Hale somehow got so intimate with the jury that he won the case." To be intimate with your audience is half the battle, and nothing so restricts and impedes that intimacy as the presence of a scrap of paper.

Then comes the question, How shall you retain your speech in your head? Shall you write it, and commit it to memory, or merely note down the points? Some of the most agreeable public speakers known to me, as, for instance, ex-Governor Long of Massachusetts, habitually write their speeches, and yet deliver them with such ease that you would think them embarked without previous preparation on an untried sea, which they are riding with buoyant safety. Wendell Phillips rarely made special preparation; his accumulated store of points and illustrations was so inexhaustible that he did not need to do anything more than simply draw upon it when the time came. Yet I remember that after hearing his Phi Beta Kappa oration, in which he had so carried away a conservative and critical audience that they found themselves applauding tyrannicide before they knew it, I said to him, "This could not have been written out beforehand," and he said, "It is already

in type at the Advertiser office." I could not have believed it. Nevertheless, in the long run, it is essential that one who speaks much, or even who speaks little, should acquire command enough of himself to say what has not been written down. In this case the fourth rule must be, Plan out a series of a few points, as simple and orderly as possible. They should be simple, both for the convenience of the audience and for your own, since otherwise you may lose yourself in subtleties and metaphysics. They should be orderly, if only that you may remember them by the method of natural succession, each one suggesting the next, and thus putting as little tax as possible on the memory. Where the points are wholly detached, you can substitute an artificial order, perhaps fixing each in your mind by some leading word that will suggest it, and then arranging these alphabetically, the object being always to tax your memory as lightly as possible, that it may do its work the better. You have now the points of your speech planned and provided-so many stepping-stones to carry you safely across the stream.

But points alone are not enough. You must hold your audience; and this must be done, not by lowering yourself in any way, but by giving that audience variety of food, and reaching their minds by facts, fancy, and wit, as well as logic. Therefore the fifth rule is, Plan beforehand for one good fact and one good illustration under each head of your speech. One is enough, for the chance is that the impulse of the occasion will give you more. The fact may be from your own experience or from a book; but it must be brief, clear, and telling. The illustration may be grave or gay, from poetry or from the newspaper corner, Shakespeare or Artemus Ward: no matter, so that it hit the mark. Most people have a sense of humor, high or low: all people have more or less imagination, however concealed by the stolid habits of daily life. George Herbert says,

A verse may find him who a sermon flies;

and if he had written "jest" in place of "verse," it would have been quite as true. But my present aim is to help the inexperienced speaker; and it is therefore well to repeat the rule, to fortify one's self beforehand with at least one good fact and