g of a confessor or
with their opinions in their bank safes,--he will have them
pleased and humored as he chooses; and they shall carry and
execute what he bids them.

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essay on _Eloquence_.

More good and more ill have been effected by persuasion than by any
other form of speech. _It is an attempt to influence by means of appeal
to some particular interest held important by the hearer._ Its motive
may be high or low, fair or unfair, honest or dishonest, calm or
passionate, and hence its scope is unparalleled in public speaking.

This "instilment of conviction," to use Matthew Arnold's expression, is
naturally a complex process in that it usually includes argumentation
and often employs suggestion, as the next chapter will illustrate. In
fact, there is little public speaking worthy of the name that is not in
some part persuasive, for men rarely speak solely to alter men's
opinions--the ulterior purpose is almost always action.

The nature of persuasion is not solely intellectual, but is largely
emotional. It uses every principle of public speaking, and every "form
of discourse," to use a rhetorician's expression, but argument
supplemented by special appeal is its peculiar quality. This we may best
see by examining

_The Methods of Persuasion_

High-minded speakers often seek to move their hearers to action by an
appeal to their highest motives, such as love of liberty. Senator Hoar,
in pleading for action on the Philippine question, used this method:

What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your
ideals and your sentimentalities? You have wasted nearly six
hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten
thousand American lives--the flower of our youth. You have
devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the
people you desire to benefit. You have established
reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their
harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other
thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable
lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in
the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in
Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and
of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship
which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or
the soldiers of the