Public Speaking: Principles and Practice Part 21

Gage thought that his secret had been kept, but Lord Percy, who had heard the people say on the Common that the troops would miss their aim, undeceived him. Gage instantly ordered that no one should leave the town. But Dr. Warren was before him, and, as the troops crossed the river, Paul Revere was rowing over the river farther down to Charlestown, having agreed with his friend, Robert Newman, to show lanterns from the belfry of the Old North Church,--

"One, if by land, and two, if by sea,"

as a signal of the march of the British.

It was a brilliant April night. The winter had been unusually mild and the spring very forward. The hills were already green; the early grain waved in the fields, and the air was sweet with blossoming orchards.

Under the cloudless moon the soldiers silently marched, and Paul Revere swiftly rode, galloping through Medford and West Cambridge, rousing every house as he went, spurring for Lexington and Hanc.o.c.k and Adams, and evading the British patrols, who had been sent out to stop the news.

Stop the news! Already the village church bells were beginning to ring the alarm, as the pulpits beneath them had been ringing for many a year. In the awakening houses lights flashed from window to window.

Drums beat faintly far away and on every side. Signal guns flashed and echoed. The watchdogs barked; the c.o.c.ks crew.

Stop the news! Stop the sunrise! The murmuring night trembled with the summons so earnestly expected, so dreaded, so desired. And as, long ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian sh.o.r.e, wailing that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels whispered, "Glory to G.o.d in the highest, for Christ is born," so, if the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal heart to portend the pa.s.sing glory of British dominion and the tragical chance of war, it whispered to them with prophetic inspiration, "Good will to men; America is born!"

There is a tradition that long before the troops reached Lexington an unknown horseman thundered at the door of Captain Joseph Robbins in Acton, waking every man and woman and babe in the cradle, shouting that the regulars were marching to Concord and that the rendezvous was the old North Bridge. Captain Robbins' son, a boy of ten years, heard the summons in the garret where he lay, and in a few minutes was on his father's old mare, a young Paul Revere, galloping along the road to rouse Captain Isaac Davis, who commanded the minutemen of Acton. The company a.s.sembled at his shop, formed, and marched a little way, when he halted them and returned for a moment to his house. He said to his wife, "Take good care of the children," kissed her, turned to his men, gave the order to march, and saw his home no more. Such was the history of that night in how many homes!

The hearts of those men and women of Middles.e.x might break, but they could not waver. They had counted the cost. They knew what and whom they served; and, as the midnight summons came, they started up and answered, "Here am I!"

THE ARTS OF THE ANCIENTS

From "Speeches and Lectures," with the permission of Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, Boston, publishers.

BY WENDELL PHILLIPS

We have a pitying estimate, a tender compa.s.sion, for the narrowness, ignorance, and darkness of the bygone ages. We seem to ourselves not only to monopolize, but to have begun, the era of light. In other words, we are all running over with a fourth-day-of-July spirit of self-content. I am often reminded of the German whom the English poet Coleridge met at Frankfort. He always took off his hat with profound respect when he ventured to speak of himself. It seems to me, the American people might be painted in the chronic att.i.tude of taking off its hat to itself.

Considering their employment of the mechanical forces, and their movement of large ma.s.ses from the earth, we know that the Egyptians had the five, seven, or three mechanical powers; but we cannot account for the multiplication and increase necessary to perform the wonders they accomplished.

There is a book telling how Domenico Fontana of the sixteenth century set up the Egyptian obelisk at Rome on end, in the Papacy of Sixtus V.

Wonderful! Yet the Egyptians quarried that stone, and carried it a hundred and fifty miles, and the Romans brought it seven hundred and fifty miles, and never said a word about it.

Take ca.n.a.ls. The Suez ca.n.a.l absorbs half its receipts in cleaning out the sand which fills it continually, and it is not yet known whether it is a pecuniary success. The ancients built a ca.n.a.l at right angles to ours; because they knew it would not fill up if built in that direction, and they knew such a one as ours would. There were magnificent ca.n.a.ls in the land of the Jews, with perfectly arranged gates and sluices. We have only just begun to understand ventilation properly for our houses; yet late experiments at the Pyramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the most perfect and scientific manner.

Again, cement is modern, for the ancients dressed and joined their stones so closely, that, in buildings thousands of years old the thin blade of a penknife cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a knowledge of steam. A painting has been discovered of a ship full of machinery, and a could only be accounted for by supposing the motive power to have been steam.

Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville says that there was no social question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt.

"Well," say you, "Franklin invented the lightning rod." I have no doubt he did; but years before his invention, and before muskets were invented, the old soldiers on guard on the towers used Franklin's invention to keep guard with; and if a spark pa.s.sed between them and the spearhead, they ran and bore the warning of the state and condition of affairs. After that you will admit that Benjamin Franklin was not the only one that knew of the presence of electricity, and the advantages derived from its use. Solomon's Temple you will find was situated on an exposed point of the hill: the temple was so lofty that it was often in peril, and was guarded by a system exactly like that of Benjamin Franklin.

Well, I may tell you a little of ancient manufactures. The d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy took a necklace from the neck of a mummy, and wore it to a ball given at the Tuileries; and everybody said they thought it was the newest thing there. A Hindoo princess came into court; and her father, seeing her, said, "Go home, you are not decently covered,--go home;"

and she said, "Father, I have seven suits on;" but the suits were of muslin so thin that the king could see through them, A Roman poet says, "the girl was in the poetic dress of the country." I fancy the French would be rather astonished at this. Four hundred and fifty years ago the first spinning machine was introduced into Europe. I have evidence to show that it made its first appearance two thousand years before.

Why have I groped among these ashes? I have told you these facts to show you that we have not invented everything--that we do not monopolize the encyclopedia. The past had knowledge. But it was the knowledge of the cla.s.ses, not of the ma.s.ses. "The beauty that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" were exclusive, the possession of the few. The science of Egypt was amazing; but it meant privilege-- the privilege of the king and the priest. It separated royalty and priesthood from the people, and was the engine of oppression. When Cambyses came down from Persia and thundered across Egypt, treading out royalty and priesthood, he trampled out at the same time civilization itself.

The distinctive glory of the nineteenth century is that it distributes knowledge; that it recognizes the divine will, which is that every man has a right to know whatever may be serviceable to himself or to his fellows; that it makes the church, the schoolhouse, and the town hall, its symbols, and humanity its care. This democratic spirit will animate our arts with immortality, if G.o.d means that they shall last.

A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

An extract from "A Man Without a Country"

BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE

Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the "Legion of the West," as the Western division of our army was then called. When Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in 1805, at Fort Ma.s.sac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow; at some dinner party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him, took him a day or two's voyage in his flatboat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and high-low-jack. But one day Nolan had his revenge. This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but as a disguised conquerer. He had defeated I know not how many district attorneys; he had dined at I know not how many public dinners; he had been heralded in I don't know how many "Weekly Arguses," and it was rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him. It was a great day--his arrival--to poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the fort an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cottonwood tree, as he said--really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you. It is none of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is to- day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage; and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for "spectacles," a string of court-martials on the officers there. One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough--that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any one who would follow him had the order been signed, "By command of His Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped--rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy:--"d.a.m.n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!"

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who was holding the court. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of "Spanish plot," "Orleans plot," and all the rest. He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him "United States" was scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed by "United States" for all the years since he had been in the army. He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be true to "United States." It was "United States" which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side. I do not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the reader why he d.a.m.ned his country, and wished he might never hear her name again.

He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September 23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name again. For that half century and more he was a man without a country.

Old Morgan, as I said, was terribly shocked. He called the court into his private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face like a sheet, to say:--

"Prisoner, hear the sentence of the court! The court decides, subject to the approval of the president, that you never hear the name of the United States again."

Nolan laughed. But n.o.body else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn, and the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Even Nolan lost his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added:--

"Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat, and deliver him to the naval commander there."

The marshal gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of court.

"Mr. Marshal," continued old Morgan, "see that no one mentions the United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to Lieutenant Mitch.e.l.l at Orleans, and request him to order that no one shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship. You will receive your written orders from the officer on duty here this evening. The court is adjourned without day."

The plan then adopted was substantially the same which was necessarily followed ever after. The Secretary of the Navy was requested to put Nolan on board a government vessel bound on a long cruise, and to direct that he should be only so far confined there as to make it certain that he never saw or heard of the country. One afternoon a lot of the men sat on the deck smoking and reading aloud. Well, so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the others; and he read very well. n.o.body in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto without a thought of what was coming:--

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said,"--

It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still unconsciously or mechanically:--

"This is my own, my native land!"

Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on:--

"Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand?-- If such there breathe, go, mark him well,"--

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on:--

"For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his t.i.tles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, Despite these t.i.tles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self,"--

and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung the book into the sea, vanished into his stateroom, and we did not see him for two months again. He never entered in with the young men exactly as a companion again; but generally he had the nervous, tired look of a heart-wounded man.

And when Nolan died, there was found in his Bible a slip of paper at the place where he had marked the text:--

"They desire a country, even a heavenly; wherefore G.o.d is not ashamed to be called their G.o.d; for He hath prepared for them a city."

On this slip of paper he had written:--

"Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it. But will not some one set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be more than I ought to bear? Say on it:-- "In Memory of "PHILIP NOLAN, "_Lieutenant in the Army of the United States_.

"He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands."