Public Speaking: Principles and Practice Part 29

To expect, under these circ.u.mstances, that such words would a.s.suage the tempest, that such actions would allay the flames,--you might as rationally expect the inundations of a torrent would suppress a deluge, or rather that the flames of Aetna would extinguish a conflagration!

III

Gentlemen of the Jury,--This case has taken up much of your time, and is likely to take up so much more that I must hasten to a close.

Indeed, I should not have troubled you, by being thus lengthy, but from a sense of duty to the prisoners; they who in some sense may be said to have put their lives in my hands; they whose situation was so peculiar that we have necessarily taken up more time than ordinary cases require. They, under all these circ.u.mstances, placed a confidence it was my duty not to disappoint, and which I have aimed at discharging with fidelity. I trust you, gentlemen, will do the like; that you will examine and judge with a becoming temper of mind; remembering that they who are under oath to declare the whole truth think and act very differently from bystanders, who, being under no ties of this kind, take a lat.i.tude which is by no means admissible in a court of law.

I cannot close this cause better than by desiring you to consider well the genius and spirit of the law which will be laid down, and to govern yourselves by this great standard of truth. To some purposes, you may be said, gentlemen, to be ministers of justice; and "ministers," says a learned judge, "appointed for the ends of public justice, should have written on their hearts the solemn engagements of his Majesty, at his coronation, to cause law and justice in mercy to be executed in all his judgments."

"The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven:...

It is twice blessed; It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes."

I leave you, gentlemen, hoping you will be directed in your inquiry and judgment to a right discharge of your duty. We shall all of us, gentlemen, have an hour of cool reflection when the feelings and agitations of the day shall have subsided; when we shall view things through a different and a much juster medium. It is then we all wish an absolving conscience. May you, gentlemen, now act such a part as will hereafter insure it; such a part as may occasion the prisoners to rejoice. May the blessing of those who were in jeopardy of life come upon you--may the blessing of Him who is "not faulty to die" descend and rest upon you and your posterity.

IN DEFENSE OF LORD GEORGE GORDON

Before the Court of King's Bench, 1781

BY LORD THOMAS ERSKINE

Gentlemen,--You have now heard, upon the solemn oaths of honest, disinterested men, a faithful history of the conduct of Lord George Gordon, from the day that he became a member of the Protestant a.s.sociation to the day that he was committed a prisoner to the Tower.

And I have no doubt, from the attention with which I have been honored from the beginning, that you have still kept in your minds the principles to which I entreated you would apply it, and that you have measured it by that standard. You have, therefore, only to look back to the whole of it together; to reflect on all you have heard concerning him; to trace him in your recollection through every part of the transaction; and, considering it with one manly, liberal view, to ask your own honest hearts, whether you can say that this n.o.ble and unfortunate youth is a wicked and deliberate traitor, who deserves by your verdict to suffer a shameful and ignominious death, which will stain the ancient honors of his house forever.

The crime which the Crown would have fixed upon him is, that he a.s.sembled the Protestant a.s.sociation round the House of Commons, not merely to influence and persuade Parliament by the earnestness of their supplications, but actually to coerce it by hostile, rebellious force; that, finding himself disappointed in the success of that coercion, he afterward incited his followers to abolish the legal indulgences to Papists, which the object of the pet.i.tion was to repeal, by the burning of their houses of worship, and the destruction of their property, which ended, at last, in a general attack on the property of all orders of men, religious and civil, on the public treasures of the nation, and on the very being of the government.

To support a charge of so atrocious and unnatural a complexion, the laws of the most arbitrary nations would require the most incontrovertible proof. And what evidence, gentlemen of the jury, does the Crown offer to you in compliance with these sound and sacred doctrines of justice? A few broken, interrupted, disjointed words, without context or connection--uttered by the speaker in agitation and heat--heard, by those who relate them to you, in the midst of tumult and confusion--and even those words, mutilated as they are, in direct opposition to, and inconsistent with, repeated and earnest declarations delivered at the very same time and on the very same occasion, related to you by a much greater number of persons, and absolutely incompatible with the whole tenor of his conduct. Which of us all, gentlemen, would be safe, standing at the bar of G.o.d or man, if we were not to be judged by the regular current of our lives and conversations, but by detached and unguarded expressions, picked out by malice, and recorded, without context or circ.u.mstances, against us? Yet such is the only evidence on which the Crown asks you to dip your hands, and to stain your consciences, in the innocent blood of the n.o.ble and unfortunate youth who stands before you.

I am sure you cannot but see, notwithstanding my great inability, increased by a perturbation of mind (arising, thank G.o.d! from no dishonest cause), that there has been not only no evidence on the part of the Crown to fix the guilt of the late commotions upon the prisoner, but that, on the contrary, we have been able to resist the probability, I might almost say the possibility of the charge, not only by living witnesses, whom we only ceased to call because the trial would never have ended, but by the evidence of all the blood that has paid the forfeit of that guilt already; since, out of all the felons who were let loose from prisons, and who a.s.sisted in the destruction of our property, not a single wretch was to be found who could even attempt to save his own life by the plausible promise of giving evidence to-day.

What can overturn such a proof as this? Surely a good man might, without superst.i.tion, believe that such a union of events was something more than natural, and that a Divine Providence was watchful for the protection of innocence and truth.

I may now, therefore, relieve you from the pain of hearing me any longer, and be myself relieved from speaking on a subject which agitates and distresses me. Since Lord George Gordon stands clear of every hostile act or purpose against the Legislature of his country, or the properties of his fellow-subjects--since the whole tenor of conduct repels the belief of the _traitorous intention_ charged by the indictment--my task is finished. I shall make no address to your pa.s.sions. I will not remind you of the long and rigorous imprisonment he has suffered; I will not speak to you of his great youth, of his ill.u.s.trious birth, and of his uniformly animated and generous zeal in Parliament for the Const.i.tution of his country. Such topics might be useful in the balance; yet, even then, I should have trusted to the honest hearts of Englishmen to have felt them without excitation. At present, the plain and rigid rules of justice and truth are sufficient to ent.i.tle me to your verdict.

p.r.o.nOUNCING SENTENCE FOR HIGH TREASON

BY SIR ALFRED WILLS

Arthur Alfred Lynch, otherwise Arthur Lynch, the jury have found you guilty of the crime of high treason, a crime happily so rare that in the present day a trial for treason seems to be almost an anachronism-- a thing of the past. The misdeeds which have been done in this case, and which have brought you to the lamentable pa.s.s in which you stand, must surely convince the most skeptical and apathetic of the gravity and reality of the crime. What was your action in the darkest hour of your country's fortunes, when she was engaged in the deadly struggle from which she has just emerged? You joined the ranks of your country's foes. Born in Australia, a land which has n.o.bly shown its devotion to its parent country, you have indeed taken a different course from that which was adopted by her sons. You have fought against your country, not with it. You have sought, as far as you could, to dethrone Great Britain from her place among the nations, to make her name a byword and a reproach, a synonym for weakness and irresolution. Nor can I forget that you have shed the blood, or done your best to shed the blood, of your countrymen who were fighting for their country. How many wives have been made widows, how many children orphans, by what you and those who acted under your command have done, Heaven only knows! You thought it safe at that dark hour of the Empire's fate, when Ladysmith, when Kimberley, when Mafeking, were in the very jaws of deadly peril--you thought it safe, no doubt, to lift the parricidal hand against your country. You thought she would shrink from the costly struggle wearied out by her gigantic efforts, and that, at the worst, a general peace would be made which would comprehend a general amnesty and cover up such acts as yours and save you from personal peril. You misjudged your country and failed to appreciate that, though slow to enter into a quarrel, however slow to take up arms, it has yet been her wont that in the quarrel she shall bear herself so that the opposer may beware of her, and that she is seldom so dangerous to her enemies as when the hour of national calamity has raised the dormant energies of her people--knit together every nerve and fiber of the body politic, and has made her sons determined to do all, to sacrifice all on behalf of the country that gave them birth. And against what a Sovereign and what a country did you lift your hand! A Sovereign the best beloved and most deeply honored of all the long line of English Kings and Queens, and whose lamented death was called back to my remembrance only yesterday as a fresh sorrow to many an English household. Against a country which has been the home of progress and freedom, and under whose beneficent sway, whenever you have chosen to stay within her dominions, you have enjoyed a liberty of person, a freedom of speech and action, such as you can have in no other country in Europe, and it is not too much to say in no other country in the world. The only--I will not say excuse, but palliation that I can find for conduct like yours is that it has been for some years past the fashion to treat lightly matters of this kind, so that men have been perhaps encouraged to play with sedition and to toy with treason, wrapt in a certain proud consciousness of strength begotten of the deep-seated and well-founded conviction that the loyalty of her people is supreme, and true authority in this country has slumbered or has treated with contemptuous indifference speeches and acts of sedition. It may be that you have been misled into the notion that, no matter what you did, so long as your conduct could be called a political crime, it was of no consequence. But it is one thing to talk sedition and to do small seditious acts, it is quite another thing to bear arms in the ranks of the foes of your country, and against it. Between the two the difference is immeasurable. But had you and those with whom you a.s.sociated yourself succeeded, what fatal mischief might have been done to the great inheritance which has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers--that inheritance of power which it must be our work to use n.o.bly and for good things; an inheritance of influence which will be of little effect even for good unless backed by power, and of duty which cannot be effectually performed if our power be shattered and our influence impaired. He who has attempted to do his country such irreparable wrong must be prepared to submit to the sentence which it is now my duty to p.r.o.nounce upon you. The sentence of this Court--and it is p.r.o.nounced in regard to each count of the indictment--is that you be taken hence to the place from which you came, and from thence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.

THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON

From the Official Records of the Trial in the United States Senate, 1868

BY GEORGE S. BOUTWELL

Andrew Johnson has disregarded and violated the laws and Const.i.tution of his own country. Under his administration the government has not been strengthened, but weakened. Its reputation and influence at home and abroad have been injured and diminished. Ten States of this Union are without law, without security, without safety; public order everywhere violated, public justice nowhere respected; and all in consequence of the evil purposes and machinations of the President.

Forty millions of people have been rendered anxious and uncertain as to the preservation of public peace and the perpetuity of the inst.i.tutions of freedom in this country. All cla.s.ses are oppressed by the private and public calamities which he has brought upon them. They appeal to you for relief. The nation waits in anxiety for the conclusion of these proceedings. Forty millions of people, whose interest in public affairs is in the wise and just administration of the laws, look to this tribunal as a sure defense against the encroachments of a criminally minded Chief Magistrate.

Will any one say that the heaviest judgment which you can render is any adequate punishment for these crimes? Your office is not punishment, but to secure the safety of the republic. But human tribunals are inadequate to punish those criminals who, as rulers or magistrates, by their example, conduct, policy, and crimes, become the scourge of communities and nations. No picture, no power of the imagination, can ill.u.s.trate or conceive the suffering of the poor but loyal people of the South. A patriotic, virtuous, law-abiding chief magistrate would have healed the wounds of war, soothed private and public sorrows, protected the weak, encouraged the strong, and lifted from the Southern people the burdens which now are greater than they can bear.

Travelers and astronomers inform us that in the southern heavens, near the southern cross, there is a vast s.p.a.ce which the uneducated call the hole in the sky, where the eye of man, with the aid of the powers of the telescope, has been unable to discover nebulae, or asteroid, or comet, or planet, or star, or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark region of s.p.a.ce, which is only known to be less than infinite by the evidences of creation elsewhere, the Great Author of celestial mechanism has left the chaos which was in the beginning. If this earth were capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal beings are the evidences and the pledge of our Divine origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throw, with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life, or as the absence of life, emblematical of, if not really, that "outer darkness" of which the Savior of man spoke in warning to those who are the enemies of themselves, of their race, and of their G.o.d. But it is yours to relieve, not to punish. This done and our country is again advanced in the intelligent opinion of mankind. In other governments an unfaithful ruler can be removed only by revolution, violence, or force. The proceeding here is judicial, and according to the forms of law. Your judgment will be enforced without the aid of a policeman or a soldier. What other evidence will be needed of the value of republican inst.i.tutions? What other test of the strength and vigor of our government? What other a.s.surance that the virtue of the people is equal to any emergency of national life?

BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS

Mr. Chief Justice and Senators,--If indeed we have arrived at a settled conclusion that this is a court, that it is governed by the law, that it is to confine its attention to the facts applicable to the law, and regard the sole evidence of those facts to be embraced within the testimony of witnesses or doc.u.ments produced in court, we have made great progress in separating, at least, from your further consideration much that has been impressed upon your attention heretofore. It follows from this that the President is to be tried upon the charges which are produced here, and not upon common fame.

I may as conveniently at this point of the argument as at any other pay some attention to the astronomical punishment which the learned and honorable manager, Mr. Boutwell, thinks should be applied to this novel case of impeachment of the President. Cicero I think it is who says that a lawyer should know everything, for sooner or later there is no fact in history, in science, or of human knowledge that will not come into play in his arguments. Painfully sensible of my ignorance, being devoted to a profession which "sharpens and does not enlarge the mind,"

I yet can admire without envy the superior knowledge evinced by the honorable manager. Indeed, upon my soul, I believe he is aware of an astronomical fact which many professors of that science are wholly ignorant of. But nevertheless, while some of his honorable colleagues were paying attention to an unoccupied and unappropriated island on the surface of the seas, Mr. Manager Boutwell, more ambitious, had discovered an untenanted and unappropriated region in the skies, reserved, he would have us think, in the final councils of the Almighty, as the place of punishment for convicted and deposed American Presidents.

At first I thought that his mind had become so "enlarged" that it was not "sharp" enough to discover the Const.i.tution had limited the punishment; but on reflection I saw that he was as legal and logical as he was ambitious and astronomical, for the Const.i.tution has said "removal from office," and has put no limit to the distance of the removal, so that it may be, without shedding a drop of his blood, or taking a penny of his property, or confining his limbs, instant removal from office and transportation to the skies. Truly, this is a great undertaking; and if the learned manager can only get over the obstacles of the laws of nature the Const.i.tution will not stand in his way. He can contrive no method but that of a convulsion of the earth that shall project the deposed President to this infinitely distant s.p.a.ce; but a shock of nature of so vast an energy and for so great a result on him might unsettle even the footing of the firm members of Congress. We certainly need not resort to so perilous a method as that. How shall we accomplish it? Why, in the first place, n.o.body knows where that s.p.a.ce is but the learned manager himself, and he is the necessary deputy to execute the judgment of the court.

Let it then be provided that in case of your sentence of deposition and removal from office the honorable and astronomical manager shall take into his own hands the execution of the sentence. With the President made fast to his broad and strong shoulders, and, having already essayed the flight by imagination, better prepared than anybody else to execute it in form, taking the advantage of ladders as far as ladders will go to the top of this great Capitol, and spurning then with his foot the crest of Liberty, let him set out upon his flight, while the two houses of Congress and all the people of the United States shall shout, "_Sic itur ad astra_."

II

But here a distressing doubt strikes me; how will the manager get back?

He will have got far beyond the reach of gravitation to restore him, and so ambitious a wing as his could never stoop to a downward flight.

Indeed, as he pa.s.ses through the constellations, that famous question of Carlyle by which he derides the littleness of human affairs upon the scale of the measure of the heavens, "What thinks B?otes as he drives his dogs up the zenith in their race of sidereal fire?" will force itself on his notice. What, indeed, would B?otes think of this new constellation?

Besides, reaching this s.p.a.ce, beyond the power of Congress even "to send for persons and papers," how shall he return, and how decide in the contest, there become personal and perpetual, the struggle of strength between him and the President? In this new revolution, thus established forever, who shall decide which is the sun and which is the moon? Who determine the only scientific test which reflects the hardest upon the other?

Mr. Chief Justice and Senators, we have come all at once to the great experiences and trials of a full-grown nation, all of which we thought we should escape--the distractions of civil strife, the exhaustions of powerful war. We could summon from the people a million of men and inexhaustible treasure to help the Const.i.tution in its time of need.

Can we summon now resources enough of civil prudence and of restraint of pa.s.sion to carry us through this trial, so that whatever result may follow, in whatever form, the people may feel that the Const.i.tution has received no wound! To this court, the last and best resort for this determination, it is to be left. And oh, if you could only carry yourselves back to the spirit and the purpose and the wisdom and the courage of the framers of the government, how safe would it be in your hands? How safe is it now in your hands, for you who have entered into their labors will see to it that the structure of your work comports in durability and excellence with theirs. Indeed, so familiar has the course of the argument made us with the names of the men of the convention and of the first Congress that I could sometimes seem to think that the presence even of the Chief Justice was replaced by the serene majesty of Washington, and that from Ma.s.sachusetts we had Adams and Ames, from Connecticut, Sherman and Ellsworth, from New Jersey, Paterson and Boudinot, and from New York, Hamilton and Benson, and that they were to determine this case for us. Act, then, as if under this serene and majestic presence your deliberations were to be conducted to their close, and the Const.i.tution was to come out from the watchful solicitude of these great guardians of it as if from their own judgment in this court of impeachment.

THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH

AT A UNIVERSITY CLUB DINNER

Reprinted, with the author's permission, from a speech at a dinner of The Harvard Club of New York City.

BY HENRY E. HOWLAND

There should be a proper amount of modesty in one called upon to address such an intelligent audience of educated men as I see before me, and I am conscious of it in the same sense as the patient who said to his physician, "I suffer a great deal from nervous dyspepsia, and I attribute it to the fact that I attend so many public dinners." "Ah, I see," said the doctor, "you are often called upon to speak, and the nervous apprehension upsets your digestion." "Not at all; my apprehension is entirely on account of the other speakers; I never say a thing;" and it is with some hesitation that I respond to your call.

Following out that line of thought, there is a great deal that is attractive in a gathering of College men. They have such a winsome and a winning way with them.

Richest in endowments, foremost in progress, honored by the renown of a long line of distinguished sons, the university that claims you is worthy of the homage and respect which it receives from the educated men of America.

The study of the development of the human race by educational processes which change by necessity under changing conditions and environment, is one of the most interesting that we can engage in. The greatest men of this country, or any other, have not always been made by the university, however it may be with the average. You cannot always tell by a man's degree what manner of man he is likely to be. But the value of a technical or academic training is apparent as time goes on, population increases, occupations multiply and compete, and the strife of life becomes more fierce and strenuous.

Many in these days seem to prefer notoriety to fame, because it runs along the line of least resistance. A man has to climb for fame, but he can get notoriety by an easy tumble. And others forget the one essential necessary to success, of personal effort, and, a.s.suming there is a royal road to learning, are content with the distinction of a degree from a university, without caring for what it implies, and answer as the son did to his father who asked him: "Why don't you work, my son? If you only knew how much happiness work brings, you would begin at once." "Father, I am trying to lead a life of self-denial in which happiness cuts no figure; do not tempt me."