to the same class, though of a higher order, as the theatrical exhibition.

Where there is an earnestness of thought (and earnestness is only another name for seriousness) there will always be the same quality in manner-an impressiveness in bearing and delivery. This is inconsistent with merriment of delivery, which robs speech of a certain weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the voice of storm and the hurricane manner. And men in deadly earnest do not talk loud. It has been my fortune to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were intense, but quiet. I have also seen that bravado and drunken boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate, genuine rage; it is always strident and violent, never dangerous, never sincere. The same thing is true in speech. There have only been two or three roarers in effective oratory . . . Mirabeau, by all accounts; and Demosthenes, if Æschines is to be believed, which I think he is not to be in this particular. He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had to attribute it to delivery (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree that Æschines made far the better argument). All the other great speakers have, even in their most intense passages and in situations where life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever heard. It was Robert G. Ingersoll delivering a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1884. He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence in almost any breast. He came on the stage alone, and was very carefully and elegantly attired, even to the smallest item of his grooming. His address was in manuscript, and imperfectly committed to memory. He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climax as Edwin Booth ever was in "Hamlet." His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clenched with a desperate energy, and the whole attitude

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man was that of one in awful wrath; and yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening's address-if anything, it was lower. While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to "mouth it, as many of your players do. I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it outherods Herod: pray you avoid it."

When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school. An over-tall and powerful man about forty years old had become very angry at a medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age. As his passion increased his violence grew until, finally, he was shouting his denunciations. The little man stood quietly, and also stood pat. Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished. He did neither. His fists were raised, quickly but intensely, before him, and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches-but it did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot sure enough. He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again to be knocked out. This continued for three or four times, for the giant was game, but, finally, he was "thrashed to a standstill," as the expression has it.

viding a place on Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, where the employees of the three companies can get a little country air at the time of their annual vacations.

The spot is a lovely one and delightfully situated. The accommodations last year were naturally limited because we had just taken the property over, but the three companies are spending a large sum of money to have the right kind of summerresort accommodations for all classes of their employees. The companies are perfectly willing to provide the place and spend the necessary money for development. When that is done they hope it will run on about a self-supporting basis. There is a good summer hotel there. There are some good cottages there. There are facilities for bathing, boating and fishing. We are making such arrangements that any of you who want to have a cottage and keep house for yourselves can do so. Any of you who want to go up there and camp out can do so.

We want you to feel that it is your place. We have no ax to grind in purchasing it except to add to your pleasure and comfort and to help you build up your health resources. We want the place not only to add to your enjoyment but to be a help in building up the acquaintanceship, friendship and fellowship of our institutions.

We want the girls to go there. We want them to feel that in going there they have the protection of every man who works for any of these three institutions. We want their mothers and fathers to feel that they are perfectly safe there, and that they are as much protected at Lake Lawn as they would be in their own homes.

We want to bring about the closest possible relationship between all who work in this organization and the executives of the organization. We want to get as near a family affair as we possibly can.

A CHANCE FOR EVERY BOY AND GIRL

We want every boy and girl, when he enters here, to feel that he wants to stay here, and that there is ample room for advancement in an institution of this character. I can look

his audience had gathered into itself every pedestrian who passed during his discourse-business man, professional man, working-man, or what not.

The fight above described suggests the key to the matter, as well as the manner, of speaking. The American audience properly demands, above everything else, that the speaker get to the point. Our lives are so rapid; the telephone, telegraph, and all the instantaneous agencies of our neurotically rapid civilization have made us so quick in seeing through propositions; a hundred years of universal education have produced a mentality so electric in its rapidity that effective oratory has been revolutionized within a decade.

Burke would not be tolerated now. It is doubtful, even, if Webster would. The public had already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll's redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music. Speech must now be a statement of conclusions. The listeners, with a celerity inconceivable, sum up the argument on either side of the proposition you announce, and accept or reject it by an almost unconscious process of cerebration.

The most successful speech of to-day would be one of Emerson's essays, rearranged in logical order-if such a thing were possible. Therefore, in matter, the statement is the form of address most effective to-day. Senator McDonald, the greatest natural lawyer I ever knew, told me that the best argument in a case was always the statement of the case. This is true on the face of it, of course. In form, the sentences should be short; in language, the words should be as largely as possible Anglo-Saxon. These are the words of the people you address; therefore, they are most influential with them. Also, therefore, your best method of getting Anglo-Saxon is to mingle with and talk with the common people. Also, therefore, the next best method is to read the Bible, the King James translation of which is undoubtedly the purest fountain of English that flows in all the world of our literature.

What nonsense the repeated statement that public speaking has had its day, that the newspaper has taken its place, and all the rest of that kind of talk. Public speaking will never decline until men cease to have ears to hear. How hard it is to read a speech-how delightful to listen. Speaking is nature's

some knowledge in your heads and lay up a store of information and experience for the position that may come knocking at your door, for when that opportunity comes, if you have not studied the business, you will not be in a position to take advantage of it.

Do not think the fellows who are immediately around me got there by luck. They got there by hard work and sacrifice. It is not because they are liked by the "Old Man"; it is because the work they have done has justified the opportunity to advance. That opportunity is open to everybody in an institution as large as The People's Gas Light and Coke Company. The larger an institution becomes the greater the opportunities for the young men.

The gas business of this country is bound to develop; it is, so to speak, getting its second youth; within the next twentyfive years it will reach proportions far ahead of anything in the past.

As I stated early in my remarks, the members of the community are practically all our customers, and our business is very largely dependent on public good will. The creation of that good will rests with you people. Every employee of The People's Gas Light and Coke Company can do something to further the esteem in which the institution is held by the public.

Take it in your own neighborhood. The people around you know that you work for our company. They look upon it as a very big institution; some of them regard it with a friendly eye and some of them with an unfriendly eye. Just set the example at home. For one thing, be careful of your appearance. (You know you do not have to wear precisely the latest fashions in order to be careful of your appearance—that is just an aside for the girls!) If you are not careful of your appearance and careful of your own homes, you cannot be capable of the most efficient work when you get downtown. You know you cannot live one-half of the time in disarray and disorder and then live the other half of the time in neatness. Besides that, remember the effect, as I say, upon the people around you.

I am a great believer in smartness of appearance. I am getting on in years, but I am just as anxious to be smart in appearance as when I was a young fellow forty years ago. I