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                         Increasing Personal Efficiency

                                     Women
                                Musical Culture
                                    Oratory
                                   Self Help
                            Some Advice to Young Men


                            _By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL

                                   VOLUME 5


    NATIONAL
    EXTENSION UNIVERSITY
    597 Fifth Avenue, New York

    OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY

    Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
    Printed in the United States of America




_Increasing Personal Efficiency_




I

WOMEN


Some women may be superficial in education and accomplishments,
extravagant in tastes, conspicuous in apparel, something more than
self-assured in bearing, devoted to trivialities, inclined to frequent
public places. It is, nevertheless, not without cause that art has
always shown the virtues in woman's dress, and that true literature
teems with eloquent tributes and ideal pictures of true womanhood--from
Homer's Andromache to Scott's Ellen Douglas, and farther. While
Shakespeare had no heroes, all his women except Ophelia are heroines,
even if Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are hideously wicked. In the
moral world, women are what flowers and fruit are in the physical. "The
soul's armor is never well set to the heart until woman's hand has
braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of
manhood fails."

Men will mainly be what women make them, and there can never be
_entirely free men_ until there are _entirely free women_ with no
special privileges, but with all her rights. The wife makes the home,
the mother makes the man, and she is the creator of joyous boyhood and
heroic manhood; when women fulfil their divine mission, all reform
societies will die, brutes will become men, and men shall be divine.
There are unkind things said of her in the cheaper writings of
to-day--perhaps because their authors have seen her only in
boarding-houses, restaurants, theaters, dance-halls, and at
card-parties; and the poor, degraded stage with its warped mirror shows
her up to the ridicule of the cheaper brood. The greatest writings and
the greatest dramas of all time have more than compensated for all this
indignity, and we have only to read deep into the great literature to be
disillusioned of any vulgar estimations of womanhood, and to understand
the beauty and power of soul of every woman who is true to the royalty
of womanhood.

There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he
has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the
esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of
womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters,
wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their
esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and
philosophers and high-class playwrights are the women who have been bred
mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and
only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly,
matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them--such as are
portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society,
but it is the best society--for the "women whose beauty and sweetness
and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the
Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our
faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and
all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again."

If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment
and of lack of opportunity--never from lack of intelligence and other
soul-powers. There is no sex in spiritual endowments, and woman seems
entitled to all the rights of man--plus the right of protection. Ruskin
says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of
one sex over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is
completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each
seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give."

In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has
come, Tennyson says in "The Princess":

    Yet in the long years liker must they grow:
    The man be more of woman, she of man;
    He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
    Nor lose the _wrestling_ thews that throw the world;
    She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
    Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind.

Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always
been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four
walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron
Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother.
While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any
known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman
poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons
when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son,
see that thou returnest with thy shield or on it." Napoleon claimed
that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its
men.

"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for
just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering,
arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule."
Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating
her home, woman's exigencies--and perhaps her ambitions--have forced her
more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of
speculation and energy--perhaps into some war and some conquest. The
ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded
or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has
creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education,
and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has
invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of
the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and
happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has
undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable
the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types.

Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and
only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and
although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest
and noblest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's,
wherever she can live nobly and work nobly. How many myriads in this
country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to
relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is
dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young
woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to
interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she
had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their
private lives; that although the majority were working partly or
entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of
the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like
George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Helen Hunt will long continue to
bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings.

It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work
and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern
schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women
who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to
have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer
powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and
the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have
bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood.
Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the
smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think
of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the
confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for
one week!

As a class, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a
talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to
talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure
if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking
to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably
accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so
much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration.
As dignity is a man's quality, loveliness is a woman's; her heart is
love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever
influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but
men go farther in friendship than women. Women mourn for the lost love,
says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love
consoles; a man's friendship supports. What a real man most desires in a
woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man
despises a mannish woman.

Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere
brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it
is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they
scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a godless
woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she
adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and
refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know
her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their
arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that
her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force
push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful masculine
influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best
comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions.

Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young
women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps
this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide
than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in
a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its
garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he
would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a
soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it
is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does
not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt
married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton
married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true
wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of
gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain
perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth,
like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a
deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that
conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest
merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her
husband as her appendage.

Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother
is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational
systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home
has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is
known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room
in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave.
Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each
boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy
mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do
without her.

While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home,
she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes
early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her
children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior.

Women are far more observant of little things than men, and the
greatest among them have marvelous powers of observation. It is this
power that made Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Disraeli the sturdy helpmates
they were to their husbands in all their trying cares of government. It
is said of Gladstone that it was not unusual for him to adjourn a
Cabinet meeting through a desire "to consult with Catherine." Had there
not been large power of observation, we should never have had the works
of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austin, Helen Hunt, and all the
other notable women creators of fiction. Charlotte Cushman was the
greatest actress America has ever produced because her observation was
so close that not the smallest detail of the character she played
escaped her or was neglected. The beautifying of Athens owes its
inception to Aspasia rather than to Pericles.




II

MUSICAL CULTURE


Of all the arts, none is more difficult to define than music. No two
persons seem to agree as to what it is, and a harsh sound to one is
often sweet music to another. When music is controlled by those who use
carefully their powers of observation, it will be vastly more useful to
mankind. The need of music in the advancement of humanity it too
apparent to admit of discussion. From the Greek instrument with one
string down to the wonderful pipe-organ, music has been intensely
attractive and marvelously helpful, and for the good of the human
family.

No art or science needs more to be developed to-day than that of music.
Its influence on soul and body has been noticed and advanced by some of
the greatest thinkers of ancient and modern times, therefore it is not
necessary to discuss the supreme need for real music to bring into
harmony motives and movements for good. When we duly consider the
subject of music, and ask where we shall find the great musicians who
are to-day so much in demand, we feel that many so-called schools of
music are often more misleading than instructive, and that they follow
fashions that are far more unreasonable than the fashions of dress.

The art of music needs philosophic study, and it should be begun with a
far better understanding of the many causes which contribute to its
composition. The singing of birds is literally one of the most
discordant expressions of sound. Indeed, the tones of the nightingale
and the meadow-lark are only shrill whistles when they are considered
with reference only to the tones of their voice, yet they furnish the
ideal of some of the richest music to which the ear has ever listened,
being one part of the delicate orchestra of nature. The lowing of the
cow, the bellow of the bull, the bark of an angry dog echoing among the
hills at eventide, combined with so many other different sounds and
impressions, has become enticingly sweet to the pensive listener. The
insect-choir of night has as much of the calming and refining influences
as the bird-choir of the morning.

Real music requires not only that the tones should be clear and
resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings.
"Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn
in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful
music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind,
but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My
Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral,
with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its
stained-glass windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with
a ballroom jig.

Harmonious circumstances and appropriate environment are as essential
for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The
foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and
growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed
her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too
little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner
in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner,
and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge,
has surely been misled into darkest delusion as to music, and will soon
be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place
anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity
shudder.

What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of
musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the
influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that
always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of
the auditor and permanently influences him to nobler thought, feeling,
and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are
capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or
instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in
acoustics is not music.

It has been frequently shown that music is potent in its effects upon
the body as well as upon the soul. In 1901, a notable illustration of
the power of music over disease was given at the Samaritan Hospital,
connected with Temple University in Philadelphia, although the
experiments were made under disadvantageous circumstances and
environment. The patients were informed what the physicians were
endeavoring to do, and the efforts of the first few months were wasted
for the most part. Many of the patients who were placed under the
influence of the music grew confident that they were going to be cured.
While the recovery of some seemed miraculous, those who conducted the
experiments felt that the healing might be largely due to the influence
of the mind and not directly to the music. The matter was dropped for
several months, until the patients were nearly all new cases. The
doctors charged the nurses not to let the patients know for what cause
the music was placed in the hospital. They eliminated also the personal
influence of the nurses as well as the use of drugs at the time the
music was produced. The experiment convinced those who conducted it that
music has a powerful restorative effect even upon a person who is
suffering from a combination of diseases. So many of the patients who
recovered at that time from the influence of the music are alive and in
good health to-day that common honesty disposes us to conclude that
there is some undiscovered benefit in music which should be immediately
investigated. This will never be attained by musical faddists or by
selfish musicians who sing or perform for applause or money. Some plain,
every day-man or woman will ultimately be the apostle of music for the
people, and the experiments at Samaritan Hospital furnish only a
suggestion of the resources of music which must soon be known to the
world.

There was one patient in the hospital who had lost his memory through
"softening of the brain." He lay most of the time unconscious, but
occasionally talked irrationally upon all sorts of subjects. A quartet
sang several pieces in his ward, but the nurses who sat upon each side
of him noticed no effect whatever upon him until the quartet sang "My
Old Kentucky Home." Then his eyes brightened and he began to hum the
tune. Before they had finished the third verse, he asked the nurse about
the singing, and requested the quartet to repeat the song. His
intelligence seemed completely normal for a little while after the music
ceased. He asked and answered questions clearly, but soon relapsed into
his incoherent talk and listlessness.

When the man's lawyer heard of the effects upon the patient, he asked
that the song might be sung while he was present, that he might then ask
the patient about some very important papers of great value to the
patient's family. As soon as the song was again sung by the quartet his
intelligence returned. He informed the lawyer accurately as to the bank
vault in which his box was locked, and told where he had left the keys
in a private drawer of his desk.

Although the effect of the music was not permanent as to his case, many
persons who know of it feel that some time music may be so applied as
permanently to cure even such cases, if kept up for a sufficient length
of time. Accidents to the skull, heart diseases, nervous exhaustion, and
spinal ailments seem especially amenable to music. Two of the hospital
cases of paralysis were permanently relieved by music. In one of these
cases instrumental music seemed to produce a strong electric effect.
While four violins were accompanied by an organ, the patient could use
his feet and hands, but it was several weeks before he could walk
without music. In the other case, vocal music put an insomnia patient to
sleep, but after sleeping through the program, the patient was better;
after a few trials he returned home.

Some of the hundred cases experimented upon were complete failures. But
those conducting the experiments were convinced that the failure was
attributable to the fact that they were unable to find the right kind of
music. In the use of religious selections, "Pleyel's Hymn" made the
patients of every ward worse; but "The Dead March" from Saul was
soothing to typhoid patients. When this march was rendered softly, the
nurses discovered that two cases had been so susceptible to the
influences of the music that the physicians omitted the usual treatment
and the patients recovered sooner than some other patients who had the
disease in a less dangerous form.

Children were helped by a different class of music from that used with
adults, and difference in sex also was noted. Mothers who sing to their
children may become the best investigators as to the power of vocal
music on the healthy development of childhood.

In the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, several hymns were once forcefully
rendered by the great chorus of the church to a congregation of three
thousand people. At the close, slips of paper were passed to the
worshipers, and they were asked to write upon the paper what thoughts
the music had suggested to them. While there was nothing in the anthems
suggestive of youth, and the burden of the stanzas seemed to divert from
childhood, yet more than half of the two thousand slips returned
attested that the hearer had been reminded of his schooldays and of the
games of childhood; these slips were collected before the congregation
had time to confer. It shows that the music was not in accord with the
words, and that it had greater power upon the mind than the words had.
It proves that, to produce its highest effects, sacred music must
harmonize with the meaning of the words and with the environment. It
also shows that the purpose for which one sings is an important
factor--random vociferations or a display of vocal gymnastics even of
the most cultured kind is both inartistic and unmusical.

These pages have been written to suggest that music is still with the
common people; that the future blessings which mankind shall derive from
musical art and science are probably dependent upon some observant
person who is free from the trammels of misguided and misdirected
culture, and who may come to it with an independent genius, and handle
the subject in the light of every-day common-sense.




III

ORATORY


Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press
with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has
done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from
oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced
during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public
attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the
_living_ man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which
cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for
orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the
past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the
restoration of the science and the art of oratory.

The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that
public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong. It was
such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the
greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective
debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the
pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the
hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their
addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their
talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw.

There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and
application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as
some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have
imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly
born with men and women--as the power of the true poet and the true
teacher--yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of
elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists
between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals
primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the
later science is persuasive--it has to do mainly with influencing the
head and the heart.

There is a law of oratory which does not seem to be understood or
recognized by elocution teachers. The plow-boy in a debating society of
the country school may feel that natural law, like Daniel Webster,
without being conscious that he is following it. But there is a danger
of losing this great natural power through injurious cultivation. The
powerful speaker is consciously or unconsciously observant at all times
of his audience, and he naturally adopts the tones, the gesture, and the
language which attract the most attention and leave the most potent
influence upon the audience. That is the law of all oratory, whether it
applies to the domestic animals, to conversation with our fellows, to
debates or addresses, lectures, speeches, sermons, or arguments. Where
the orator has not been misdirected or misled by some superficial
teacher of elocution, his aim will be first "to win the favorable
attention of his audience" and then to strongly impress them with his
opening sentence, his appearance, his manners, and his subject. His
reputation will have also very much to do with winning this favorable
impression at first. The words of the speaker either drive away or
attract, and the speaker endeavors at the outset to command the
attention of the hearers, whether they be dogs or congregation.

The beginner in oratory who is true to his instincts strives to adopt
the methods which he feels will favorably impress those for whom he has
a message. In his oration at the funeral of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony
disarmed the enemies of Caesar and of himself by opening his oration
with, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury
Caesar, not to _praise_ him." Almost any man or woman can become an
orator of power by keeping himself or herself natural while talking.

The second condition of a successful oration is the statements of the
important facts or truths. Cicero, the elder Pitt, and Edward Everett
held strictly to the statement of all the facts at the outset of their
speech. Facts and truths are the most important things in all kinds of
oratory; as they are the most difficult to handle, the audience is more
likely to listen to them at the opening of the talk, and they must be
placed before the hearers clearly and emphatically, before the speaker
enters upon the next division of his address.

The third condition of a successful address is the argument, or
reasoning which is used to prove the conclusion he wishes his hearers to
reach. It is here that logic has its special place; it is at this vital
point that many political speakers fail to convince the men they
address. After he has thus reasoned, the natural orator makes his
appeal, which is the _chief purpose_ of all true oratory. It is here
where the orator becomes vehement, here where he shows all the ornament
of his talk in appropriate figures of speech. The most effective orators
are always those whose hearts are in strong sympathy with humanity, and
whose sympathies are always aroused to plead for men. This is the
condition that accounts for the eloquence--the power to arouse
hearers--which characterizes men like Logan, the American Indian, and
which characterizes many of the religious enthusiasts like Peter the
Hermit, who have surprised the world and often moved them to mighty
deeds.

So long as our government depends upon the votes of the people, just so
long must there be a stirring need of men and women orators to teach the
principles of government and to keep open to the light of truth the
consciences of the thousands and millions whose votes will decide the
welfare or the misfortune of our nation. As the speaker must adapt
himself and his message to all kinds of people, it is difficult to
advise any one in certain terms how to accomplish this. It is another
instance of the necessity of cultivating the daily habit of observation,
and of being always loyal to our instincts.

While schools and colleges have their uses, they are by no means a
necessity for those who will accomplish great things through their
oratory. Many a man laden with a wealth of college accomplishment has
been an utter failure on the platform. Where reading-matter is as
abundant and as cheap as it is in America, the poor boy at work upon the
farm or in the factory, with no time but his evenings for study, may get
the essentials of education, and by observing those who speak may give
himself forms of oratorical expression that will enable him to outshine
those with scholarship who have been led into fads.

We must be impressed with a high sense of duty in becoming an orator of
any class; we must feel that it is our calling to adhere to the truth
always and in all things, to warn our hearers of dangers, and to
encourage the good and help those who are struggling to be so. We must
have a passion for oratory which shall impel us to vigorous thought and
eloquent expression. The greatest oratory is that which is most
persuasive. It is not so fully in what an orator says or the vehemence
with which he says it that counts, but the practical good that results
from it. Many an oration has been elegant enough from its choice diction
and labored phraseology, yet it has fallen flat upon the audience.

When a man has been worked into natural passion over his theme, his
words will strike root and inspire his hearers into similar passion. It
is wonderful how true are our instincts in detecting what comes from the
heart and that which is mere words. The greatest orators have been those
who have not learned "by rote" what they have spoken. When Lincoln broke
away in his celebrated Cooper Institute address, and pictured the word
freedom written by the Lord across the skies in rainbow hues, the hearts
of his audience stopped beating for the instant. It is foolhardy for any
one to presume to speak with no preparation, for those who wish to give
themselves to oratory should carefully study the great debaters, learn
how they expressed themselves, and then accumulate important truths and
facts concerning their subject. But we must not forget that too much
study as to nicety of expression may lose something of the mountainous
effects of what we wish to state.

When an orator _feels_ his subject, his soul overflows with a thrill
indescribable, which is known only to those who have felt it. Genius is
lifted free for the moment to fly at will to the mountain heights, and
finds supreme delight therein. Everything that is food for the mind is
helpful to the orator, whether it come from school or work. But it is an
attainment which can be reached by the every-day plain man employed in
any every-day occupation. Demosthenes, the greatest orator the world has
yet known, found his School of Oratory along the shore talking to the
waves. John B. Gough and Henry Clay and both the elder and the younger
Pitt gained all their powers by means as humble. The mere study of
grammar has never yet made a correct speaker; the mere study of rhetoric
has never yet made a correct and powerful writer; and the study of
elocution cannot make an orator. Grammar, rhetoric, and elocution may
teach him only the laws which govern speech, writing, oratory, and leave
him