Public Speaking: Principles and Practice Part 16

He weren't no saint,--them engineers Is all pretty much alike,-- One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill And another one here, in Pike; A keerless man in his talk was Jim, And an awkward hand in a row, But he never flunked, and he never lied,-- I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had,-- To treat his engine well; Never be pa.s.sed on the river; To mind the pilot's bell; And if ever the "Prairie Belle" took fire,-- A thousand times he swore, He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank Till the last soul got ash.o.r.e.

All boats has their day on the Mississip, And her day come at last,-- The "Movastar" was a better boat, But the "Belle" she _wouldn't_ be pa.s.sed.

And so she come tearin' along that night-- The oldest craft on the line-- With a n.i.g.g.e.r squat on her safety valve, And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she cleared the bar, And burnt a hole in the night, And quick as a flash she turned, and made For that willer-bank on the right.

There was runnin' and cursing but Jim yelled out, Over all the infernal roar, "I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank Till the last galoot's ash.o.r.e."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat Jim Bludso's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knowed he would keep his word.

And, sure's you're born, they all got off Afore the smokestacks fell,-- And Bludso's ghost went up alone In the smoke of the "Prairie Belle."

He weren't no saint,--but at jedgment I'd run my chance with Jim, 'Longside of some pious gentlemen That wouldn't shake hands with him.

He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,-- And he went for it thar and then; And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard On a man that died for men.

THE TRIAL OF ABNER BARROW

From "The Boy Orator of Zepata City" in "The Exiles and Other Stories."

Copyrighted, 1894, Harper and Brothers. Reprinted with permission.

BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Abe Barrow had been closely a.s.sociated with the early history of Zepata; he had killed in his day several of the Zepata citizens. His fight with Thompson had been a fair fight--as those said who remembered it--and Thompson was a man they could well spare; but the case against Barrow had been prepared by the new and youthful district attorney, and the people were satisfied and grateful.

Harry Harvey, "The Boy Orator of Zepata City," as he was called, turned slowly on his heels, and swept the court room carelessly with a glance of his clever black eyes. The moment was his.

"This man," he said, and as he spoke even the wind in the corridors hushed for the moment, "is no part or parcel of Zepata city of to-day.

He comes to us a relic of the past--a past that was full of hardships and glorious efforts in the face of daily disappointments, embitterments and rebuffs. But the part _this_ man played in that past lives only in the court records of that day. This man, Abe Barrow, enjoys, and has enjoyed, a reputation as a 'bad man,' a desperate and brutal ruffian. Free him to-day, and you set a premium on such reputations; acquit him of this crime, and you encourage others to like evil. Let him go, and he will walk the streets with a swagger, and boast that you were afraid to touch him--_afraid_, gentlemen--and children and women will point after him as the man who has sent nine others into eternity, and who yet walks the streets a free man. And he will become, in the eyes of the young and the weak, a hero and a G.o.d.

"For the last ten years, your honor, this man, Abner Barrow, has been serving a term of imprisonment in the state penitentiary; I ask you to send him back there again for the remainder of his life. Abe Barrow is out of date. This Rip Van Winkle of the past returns to find a city where he left a prairie town; a bank where he spun his roulette-wheel; this magnificent courthouse instead of a vigilance committee! He is there, in the prisoner's pen, a convicted murderer and an unconvicted a.s.sa.s.sin, the last of his race,--the bullies and bad men of the border,--a thing to be forgotten and put away forever from the sight of men. And I ask you, gentlemen, to put him away where he will not hear the voice of man nor children's laughter, nor see a woman's smile. Bury him with the bitter past, with the lawlessness that has gone--that has gone, thank G.o.d--and which must not return."

The district attorney sat down suddenly, and was conscious of nothing until the foreman p.r.o.nounced the prisoner at the bar guilty of murder in the second degree.

Judge Truax leaned across his desk and said, simply, that it lay in his power to sentence the prisoner to not less than two years' confinement in the state penitentiary, or for the remainder of his life.

"Before I deliver sentence on you, Abner Barrow," he said with an old man's kind severity, "is there anything you have to say on your own behalf?"

Barrow's face was white with the prison tan, and pinched and hollow- eyed and worn. When he spoke his voice had the huskiness which comes from non-use, and cracked and broke like a child's.

"I don't know, Judge," he said, "that I have anything to say in my own behalf. I guess what the gentleman said about me is all there is to say. I _am_ a back number, I _am_ out of date; I _was_ a loafer and a blackguard. He told you I had no part or parcel in this city, or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city, and to this world--and to me; one thing that I couldn't take to jail with me, and I'll have to leave behind me when I go back to it. I mean my wife.

You, sir, remember her, sir, when I married her twelve years ago. She gave up everything a woman ought to have, to come to me. She thought she was going to be happy with me; that's why she come, I guess. Maybe she was happy for about two weeks. After that first two weeks her life, sir, was a h.e.l.l, and I made it a h.e.l.l. Respectable women wouldn't speak to her because she was my wife--and she had no children. That was her life. She lived alone over the dance-hall, and sometimes when I was drunk--I beat her.

"At the end of two years I killed Welsh, and they sent me to the pen for ten years, and she was free. She could have gone back to her folks and got a divorce if she'd wanted to, and never seen me again. It was an escape most women'd gone down on their knees and thanked their Maker for.

"But what did this woman do--my wife, the woman I misused and beat and dragged down in the mud with me? She was too mighty proud to go back to her people, or to the friends who shook her when she was in trouble; and she sold out the place, and bought a ranch with the money, and worked it by herself, worked it day and night, until in ten years she had made herself an old woman, as you see she is to-day.

"And for what? To get _me_ free again; to bring _me_ things to eat in jail, and picture papers, and tobacco--when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water--working to pay for a lawyer to fight for _me_--to pay for the _best_ lawyer.

"And what I want to ask of you, sir, is to let me have two years out of jail to show her how I feel about it. It's all I've thought of when I was in jail, to be able to see her sitting in her own kitchen with her hands folded, and me working and sweating in the fields for her, working till every bone ached, trying to make it up to her.

"And I can't, I can't! It's too late! It's too late! Don't send me back for life! Give me a few years to work for her--to show her what I feel here, what I never felt for her before. Look at her, gentlemen, look how worn she is, and poorly, and look at her hands, and you men must feel how I feel--I don't ask you for myself. I don't want to go free on my own account. My G.o.d! Judge, don't bury me alive, as that man asked you to. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I'm saying is true."

Judge Truax looked at the papers on his desk for some seconds, and raised his head, coughing as he did so.

"It lies--it lies at the discretion of this Court to sentence the prisoner to a term of imprisonment of two years, or for an indefinite period, or for life. Owing to--on account of certain circ.u.mstances which were--have arisen--this sentence is suspended. This Court stands adjourned."

PART THREE

PLATFORM PRACTICE

THE SPEECH OF FORMAL OCCASION

THE BENEFITS OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

From an address by the President to the students of Harvard University, at the announcement of Academic Distinctions, 1909

BY ABBOTT LAWRENCE LOWELL

This meeting is held not merely to honor the men who have won prizes, attained high rank, or achieved distinction in studies. In a larger sense it is a tribute paid by the University to the ideals of scholarship. It is a public confession of faith in the aims for which the University was established. We may, therefore, not inappropriately consider here the nature and significance of scholarship.

Without attempting an exhaustive catalogue of the benefits of education, we may note three distinct objects of college study. The first is the development of the mental powers with a view to their use in any subsequent career. In its broadest sense this may be called training for citizenship, for we must remember that good citizenship does not consist exclusively in rendering public service in political and philanthropic matters. It includes also conducting an industrial or professional career so as not to leave the public welfare out of sight.

Popular government is exacting. It implies that in some form every man shall voluntarily consecrate a part of his time and force to the state, and the better the citizen, the greater the effort he will make. On the function of colleges in fitting men for citizenship and for active work, much emphasis has been laid of late. Yet it is not the only aim of college studies. Another object is cultivation of the mind, refinement of taste, a development of the qualities that distinguish the civilized man from the barbarian. Nor does the value of these things lie in personal satisfaction alone. There is a culture that is selfish and exclusive, that is self-centered and conceited. The intellectual sn.o.b is quite as repellant as any other. But this is true of the moral distortion of all good qualities. The culture that narrows the sympathies, instead of enlarging them, has surely missed the object that should give its chief worth and dignity. The culture that reveals beauty in all its forms, that refines the sensibilities, and expands the mental horizon, that, without a sense of superiority, desires to share these things with others, and makes the lives of all men better worth living, is like the glow of fire in a cold room. It is a form of social service of a high order.

A third benefit of college education is the contact it affords with the work of creative imagination. The highest type of scholar is the creative scholar, just as the highest type of citizen is the statesman.

The greatest figures in history, as almost every one will admit, are the thinkers and the rulers of men. People will always differ in the relative value they ascribe to these two supreme forms of human power.

But if one may indulge in apocalyptic visions, I should prefer in another world to be worthy of the friendship of Aristotle rather than of Alexander, of Shakespeare or Newton than of Napoleon or Frederick the Great.

When I spoke of the benefit of college life in training for citizenship, and in imparting culture, I was obviously dealing with things which lie within the reach of every student; but in speaking of creative scholarship you may think that I am appealing only to the few men who have the rare gift of creative genius. But happily the progress of the world is not in the exclusive custody of the occasional men of genius. Great originality is, indeed, rare; but on a smaller scale it is not uncommon, and the same principles apply to the production of all creative work. The great scholar and the lesser intellectual lights differ in brilliancy, but the same process must be followed to bring them to their highest splendor. Nor is it the genius alone, or even the man of talent, who can enjoy and aid productive thought. It is not given to all men to possess creative scholarship themselves; but most men by following its footsteps can learn to respect it and feel its charm; and for any man who pa.s.ses through college without doing so, college education has been in one of its most vital elements a failure.

If he has not recognized the glowing imagination, the lofty ideals, the patience and the modesty, that characterize the true scholar, his time here has been spent, not perhaps without profit, but without inspiration.

All productive work is largely dependent upon appreciation by the community. The great painters of Italy would have been sterile had not the citizens of Florence been eager to carry Cimabue's masterpiece in triumph through the streets. Kant would never have written among a people who despised philosophy; and the discoveries of our own day would have been impossible in an unscientific age. Every man who has learned to respect creative scholarship can enter into its spirit, and by respecting it he helps to foster it.

WHAT THE COLLEGE GIVES

From "Girls and Education," a commencement address, Bryn Mawr College, 1911, by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of this author's works.

BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS

One of the best gifts that a college can bestow is the power of taking a new point of view through putting ourselves into another's place. To many students this comes hard, but come it must, as they hope to be saved.

To the American world the name of Charles Eliot Norton stands for all that is fastidious, even for what is over-fastidious; but Charles Eliot Norton's collection of verse and prose called "The Heart of Oak Books"