Public Speaking: Principles and Practice Part 8

From an address in the House of Commons, March, 1865

BY JOHN BRIGHT

Why should we fear a great nation on the American Continent? Some people fear that, should America become a great nation, she will be arrogant and aggressive. But that does not follow. The character of a nation does not depend altogether upon its size, but upon the intelligence, instruction, and morals of its people. You fancy the supremacy of the sea will pa.s.s away from you; and the n.o.ble lord, who has had much experience, and is supposed to be wiser on the subject than any other man in the House, will say that "Rule Britannia," that n.o.ble old song, may become obsolete. Well, inasmuch as the supremacy of the seas means arrogance and the a.s.sumption of dictatorial power on the part of this country, the sooner that becomes obsolete the better. I do not believe that it is for the advantage of this country, or of any country in the world, that any one nation should pride itself upon what is termed the supremacy of the sea; and I hope the time is coming--I believe the hour is hastening--when we shall find that law and justice will guide the councils and will direct the policy of the Christian nations of the world. Nature will not be baffled because we are jealous of the United States--the decrees of Providence will not be overthrown by aught we can do.

The population of the United States is now not less than 35,000,000.

When the next Parliament of England has lived to the age which this has lived to, that population will be 40,000,000, and you may calculate the increase at the rate of rather more than 1,000,000 of persons per year.

Who is to gainsay it? Will constant snarling at a great republic alter this state of things, or swell us up in these islands to 40,000,000 or 50,000,000, or bring them down to our 30,000,000? Honorable members and the country at large should consider these facts, and learn from them that it is the interest of the nations to be at one--and for us to be in perfect courtesy and amity with the great English nation on the other side of the Atlantic.

VALUES AND TRANSITIONS

KING ROBERT OF SICILY

From "King Robert of Sicily," by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of this author's works.

BY HENRY W. LONGFELLOW

Days came and went; and now returned again To Sicily the old Saturnian reign; Under the Angel's governance benign The happy island danced with corn and wine.

Meanwhile King Robert yielded to his fate, Sullen and silent and disconsolate.

Dressed in the motley garb that Jesters wear, With look bewildered and a vacant stare, Close shaven above the ears, as monks are shorn, By courtiers mocked, by pages laughed to scorn, His only friend the ape, his only food What others left,--he still was unsubdued.

And when the Angel met him on his way, And half in earnest, half in jest, would say, Sternly, though tenderly, that he might feel The velvet scabbard held a sword of steel, "Art thou the King?" the pa.s.sion of his woe Burst from him in resistless overflow, And, lifting high his forehead, he would fling The haughty answer back, "I am, I am the King!"

Almost three years were ended; when there came Amba.s.sadors of great repute and name From Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine, Unto King Robert, saying that Pope Urbane By letter summoned them forthwith to come On Holy Thursday to his city of Rome.

And lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country towns through which they went.

The Pope received them with great pomp and blare Of bannered trumpets, on Saint Peter's square, Giving his benediction and embrace Fervent and full of apostolic grace.

While with congratulations and with prayers He entertained the Angel unawares, Robert, the Jester, bursting through the crowd, Into their presence rushed, and cried aloud: "I am the King! Look, and behold in me Robert, your brother, King of Sicily!

This man who wears my semblance to your eyes, Is an imposter in a king's disguise.

Do you not know me? does no voice within Answer my cry, and say we are akin?"

The Pope in silence, but with troubled mien, Gazed at the Angel's countenance serene; The Emperor, laughing, said, "It is strange sport To keep a madman for thy Fool at court!"

And the poor, baffled Jester in disgrace Was hustled back among the populace.

LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE

An extract from "Masters of the Situation," a lecture

BY JAMES T. FIELDS

When I talk across an ocean of 3000 miles, with my friends on the other side of it, and feel that I may know any hour of the day if all goes well with them, I think with grat.i.tude of the immense energy and perseverance of that one man, Cyrus W. Field, who spent so many years of his life in perfecting a communication second only in importance to the discovery of this country. Think what that enthusiast accomplished by his untiring energy. He made fifty voyages across the Atlantic.

Eight years more he encountered the odium of failure, but still kept plowing across the Atlantic, flying from city to city, soliciting capital, holding meetings and forcing down this most colossal discouragement. At last day dawned again, and another cable was paid out--this time from the deck of the "Great Eastern." Twelve hundred miles of it were laid down, and the ship was just lifting her head to a stiff breeze then springing up, when, without a moment's warning, the cable suddenly snapped short off, and plunged into the sea. Nine days and nights they dragged the bottom of the sea for this lost treasure, and though they grappled it three times, they could not bring it to the surface. In five months another cable was shipped on board the "Great Eastern," and this time, by the blessing of heaven, the wires were stretched unharmed from continent to continent. Then came that never- to-be-forgotten search, in four ships, for the lost cable. In the bow of one of these vessels stood Cyrus Field, day and night, in storm and fog, squall and calm, intensely watching the quiver of the grapnel that was dragging two miles down on the bottom of the deep.

At length on the last night of August, a little before midnight, the spirit of this great man was rewarded. I shall here quote his own words, as none others could possibly convey so well the thrilling interest of that hour. He says: "All felt as if life and death hung on the issue. It was only when the cable was brought over the bow and onto the deck that men dared to breathe. Even then they hardly believed their eyes. Some crept toward it to feel of it to be sure it was there.

Then we carried it along to the electricians' room, to see if our long- sought treasure was dead or alive. A few minutes of suspense and a flash told of the lightning current again set free. Then the feeling long pent up burst forth. Some turned away their heads and wept. Others broke into cheers, and the cry ran from man to man, and was heard down in the engine rooms, deck below deck, and from the boats on the water, and the other ships, while the rockets lighted up the darkness of the sea. Then, with thankful hearts, we turned our faces again to the West.

But soon the wind rose, and for thirty-six hours we were exposed to all the dangers of a storm on the Atlantic. Yet, in the very height and fury of the gale, as I sat in the electricians' room, a flash of light came up from the deep, which, having crossed to Ireland, came back to me in mid-ocean, telling me that those so dear to me, whom I had left on the banks of the Hudson, were well, and following us with their wishes and their prayers. This was like a whisper of G.o.d from the sea, bidding me keep heart and hope."

And now, after all those thirteen years of almost superhuman struggle and that one moment of almost superhuman victory, I think we may safely include Cyrus Field among the masters of the situation.

O'CONNELL, THE ORATOR

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

BY WENDELL PHILLIPS

Broadly considered, O'Connell's eloquence has never been equaled in modern times, certainly not in English speech. Do you think I am partial? I will vouch John Randolph of Roanoke, the Virginia slaveholder, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he hated a Yankee, himself an orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed, "This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak the English tongue in my day!" I think he was right. I remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate; I know the eloquence that lay hid in the iron logic of Calhoun; I have melted beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi, who wielded a power few men ever had; it has been my fortune to sit at the feet of the great speakers of the English tongue on the other side of the ocean; but I think all of them together never surpa.s.sed, and no one of them ever equaled O'Connell.

Nature intended him for our Demosthenes. Never, since the great Greek, has she sent forth one so lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. In the first place, he had a magnificent presence, impressive in bearing, ma.s.sive, like that of Jupiter. Webster himself hardly outdid him in the majesty of his proportions. To be sure, he had not Webster's craggy face, and precipice of brow, not his eyes glowing like anthracite coal. Nor had he the lion roar of Mirabeau. But his presence filled the eye. A small O'Connell would hardly have been an O'Connell at all. These physical advantages are half the battle.

I remember Russell Lowell telling us that Mr. Webster came home from Washington at the time the Whig party thought of dissolution, a year or two before his death, and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest; drawing himself up to his loftiest proportion, his brow clothed with thunder, before the listening thousands, he said, "Well, gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Ma.s.sachusetts Whig, a Faneuil-Hall Whig, a revolutionary Whig, a const.i.tutional Whig. If you break the Whig party, sir, where am I to go?" And says Lowell, "We held our breath, thinking where he _could_ go. If he had been five feet three, we should have said, 'Who cares where you go?'" So it was with O'Connell. There was something majestic in his presence before he spoke; and he added to it what Webster had not, what Clay might have lent--infinite grace, that magnetism that melts all hearts into one. I saw him at over sixty-six years of age; every att.i.tude was beauty, every gesture grace. You could only think of a greyhound as you looked at him; it would have been delightful to watch him, if he had not spoken a word. Then he had a voice that covered the gamut. The majesty of his indignation, fitly uttered in tones of superhuman power, made him able to "indict" a nation. Carlyle says, "He is G.o.d's own anointed king whose single word melts all wills into his." This describes O'Connell. Emerson says, "There is no true eloquence unless there is a man behind the speech."

Daniel O'Connell was listened to because all England and all Ireland knew that there was a man behind the speech.

I heard him once say, "I send my voice across the Atlantic, careering like the thunderstorm against the breeze, to remind the bondman that the dawn of his redemption is already breaking." You seemed to hear the tones come echoing back to London from the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the slightest possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story, while all Exeter Hall shook with laughter. The next moment, tears in his voice like a Scotch song, five thousand men wept. And all the while no effort. He seemed only breathing.

"As effortless as woodland nooks Send violets up, and paint them blue."

JUSTIFICATION FOR IMPEACHMENT

Against Warren Hastings, House of Lords, February, 1788

BY EDMUND BURKE

In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.

My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms.

Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.

My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and barriers of nature, united by the bonds of a social and moral community--all the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of India.

Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit and whose power you exercise.

We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the sovereign and the subject-- offering a pledge, in that situation, for the support of the rights of the Crown and the liberties of the people, both of which extremities they touch.

WENDELL PHILLIPS, THE ORATOR

From "The Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis," Vol. III.

Copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.

BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

It was not until Lovejoy fell, while defending his press at Alton, in November, 1837, that an American citizen was killed by a raging mob for declaring, in a free State, the right of innocent men and women to their personal liberty. This tragedy, like the deadly blow at Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber, twenty years afterward, awed the whole country with a sense of vast and momentous peril. Never since the people of Boston thronged Faneuil Hall on the day after the ma.s.sacre in State Street, had that ancient hall seen a more solemn and significant a.s.sembly. It was the more solemn, the more significant, because the excited mult.i.tude was no longer, as in the Revolutionary day, inspired by one unanimous and overwhelming purpose to a.s.sert and maintain liberty of speech as the bulwark of all other liberty. It was an unwonted and foreboding scene. An evil spirit was in the air.

When the seemly protest against the monstrous crime had been spoken, and the proper duty of the day was done, a voice was heard,--the voice of the high officer solemnly sworn to prosecute, in the name of Ma.s.sachusetts, every violation of law, declaring, in Faneuil Hall, sixty years after the battle of Bunker Hill, and amid a howling storm of applause, that an American citizen who was put to death by a mad crowd of his fellow citizens for defending his right of free speech, died as the fool dieth. Boston has seen dark days, but never a moment so dark as that. Seven years before, Webster had said, in the famous words that Ma.s.sachusetts binds as frontlets between her eyes, "There are Boston and Concord, and Lexington and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever." Had they already vanished? Was the spirit of the Revolution quite extinct? In the very Cradle of Liberty did no son survive to awake its slumbering echoes? By the grace of G.o.d such a son there was. He had come with the mult.i.tude, and he had heard with sympathy and approval the speeches that condemned the wrong; but when the cruel voice justified the murderers of Lovejoy, the heart of the young man burned within him. This speech, he said to himself, must be answered. As the malign strain proceeded, the Boston boy, all on fire, with Concord and Lexington tugging at his heart, unconsciously murmured, "Such a speech in Faneuil Hall must be answered in Faneuil Hall." "Why not answer it yourself?" whispered a neighbor, who overheard him. "Help me to the platform and I will,"--and pushing and struggling through the dense and threatening crowd, the young man reached the platform, was lifted upon it, and, advancing to speak, was greeted with a roar of hostile cries. But riding the whirlwind undismayed, as for many a year afterward he directed the same wild storm, he stood upon the platform in all the beauty and grace of imperial youth,--the Greeks would have said a G.o.d descended,--and in words that touched the mind and heart and conscience of that vast mult.i.tude, as with fire from heaven, recalling Boston to herself, he saved his native city and her Cradle of Liberty from the d.a.m.ning disgrace of stoning the first martyr in the great struggle for personal freedom. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton, side by side with Otis and Hanc.o.c.k, and Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American--the slanderer of the dead." And even as he spoke the vision was fulfilled. Once more its native music rang through Faneuil Hall. In the orator's own burning words, those pictured lips did break into immortal rebuke. In Wendell Phillips, glowing with holy indignation at the insult to America and to man, John Adams and James Otis, Josiah Quincy and Samuel Adams, though dead, yet spake.