he debate or questions better.

There are plenty of business men to-day who would give a great deal of
money if they could only go back and improve the early opportunities
for learning to think and speak on their feet which they threw away.
Now they have money, they have position, but they are nobodies when
called upon to speak in public. All they can do is to look foolish,
blush, stammer out an apology and sit down.

Some time ago I was at a public meeting when a man who stands very high
in the community, who is king in his specialty, was called upon to give
his opinion upon the matter under consideration, and he got up and
trembled and stammered and could scarcely say his soul was his own. He
could not even make a decent appearance. He had power and a great deal
of experience, but there he stood, as helpless as a child, and he felt
cheap, mortified, embarrassed, and probably would have given anything
if he had early in life trained himself to get himself in hand so that
he could think on his feet and say with power and effectiveness that
which he knew.

At the very meeting where this strong man who had the respect and
confidence of everybody who knew him, and who made such a miserable
failure of his attempt to give his opinion upon an important public
matter on which he was well posted, being so confused and
self-conscious and "stage struck" that he could say scarcely anything,
a shallow-brained business man, in the same city, who hadn't a
hundredth part of the other man's practical power in affairs, got up
and made a brilliant speech, and strangers no doubt thought that he was
much the stronger man. He had simply cultivated the ability to say his
best thing on his feet, and the other man had not, and was placed at a
tremendous disadvantage.

A very brilliant young man in New York who has climbed to a responsible
position in a very short time, tells me that he has been surprised on
several occasions when he has been called upon to speak at banquets, or
on other public occasions, at the new discoveries he has made of
himself of power which he never before dreamed he possessed, and he now
regrets more than anything else that he has allowed so many
opportunities for calling himself out to go by in the past.

The effort to express one's ideas in lucid, clean-cut, concise, telling
English tends to make one's everyday language choicer and more direct,
and improves one's diction generally. In this and other ways
s