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 has already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll's
redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music. The effective speech
to-day is 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 a process of unconscious mental 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 now most effective.
Recall the opinion of Senator McDonald--the greatest natural lawyer I
ever knew--that the best argument in a case always is the statement of
the case.

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. 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 choicest method of instruction.

It begins with mother to child; it continues with teacher to pupil; it
continues still in lecturer or professor to his student (for the
universities are all going back to the old oral method of
instruction); and it still continues in all the forms of effective
human communication.

The newspapers are a marvelous influence, but they are not
everything, and they do not supply everything. For example, it is
commonly supposed that they, absolutely and exclusively, mold and
control public opinion. But they do not. When all has been said, the
most powerful public opinion, after all, is that from-mouth-to-mouth
public opinion--that living, moving opinion--which spreads from
neighbor