has the mania to attain wealth
and position, we no longer have time to reflect with deliberation, and
to develop our powers of conversation. In these great newspaper and
periodical days, when everybody can get for one or a few cents the news
and information which it has cost thousands of dollars to collect,
everybody sits behind the morning sheet or is buried in a book or
magazine. There is no longer the same need of communicating thought by
the spoken word.

Oratory is becoming a lost art for the same reason. Printing has
become so cheap that even the poorest homes can get more reading for a
few dollars than kings and noblemen could afford in the Middle Ages.

It is a rare thing to find a polished conversationalist to-day. So
rare is it to hear one speaking exquisite English, and using a superb
diction, that it is indeed a luxury.

Good reading, however, will not only broaden the mind and give new
ideas, but it will also increase one's vocabulary, and that is a great
aid to conversation. Many people have good thoughts and ideas, but
they cannot express them because of the poverty of their vocabulary.
They have not words enough to clothe their ideas and make them
attractive. They talk around in a circle, repeat and repeat, because,
when they want a particular word to convey their exact meaning, they
cannot find it.

If you are ambitious to talk well, you must be as much as possible in
the society of well-bred, cultured people. If you seclude yourself,
though you are a college graduate, you will be a poor converser.

We all sympathize with people, especially the timid and shy, who have
that awful feeling of repression and stifling of thought, when they
make an effort to say something and cannot. Timid young people often
suffer keenly in this way in attempting to declaim at school or
college. But many a great orator went through the same sort of
experience, when he first attempted to speak in public and was often
deeply humiliated by his blunders and failures. There is no other way,
however, to become an orator or a good conversationalist than by
constantly trying to express oneself efficiently and elegantly.

If you find that your ideas fly from you when you attempt to express
them, that you stammer and flounder about for words which you are
unable to find, you may be sure that every honest effort you make, even
if you fail in your attempt, will make it all the easier for you to
speak well the next time