The World's Best Orations Part 1

The World's Best Orations.

by Various.

PREFACE

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire; but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being he is master.

Through the clearness of his logic, the keenness of his wit, the power of his appeal, or that magnetic something which is felt and yet cannot be defined, or through all together, he sways his audience as the storm bends the branches of the forest. Hence it is that in all times this wonderful power has been something longed for and striven for. Demosthenes, on the beach, struggling with the pebbles in his mouth to perfect his articulation, has been the great example. Yet it is often true of the orator, as of the poet; _nascitur_ _non_ _fit_. Patrick Henry seemed to be inspired as "Give me liberty or give me death" rolled from his lips. The untutored savage has shown himself an orator.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel! Do we not all feel the magic of the power, and when occasionally we are permitted to listen to a great orator how completely we lose ourselves and yield in willing submission to the imperious and impetuous flow of his speech! It is said that after Webster's great reply to Hayne every Ma.s.sachusetts man walking down Pennsylvania Avenue seemed a foot taller.

This marvelous power is incapable of complete preservation on the printed page. The presence, the eye, the voice, the magnetic touch, are beyond record. The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic. It is the marvelous light flas.h.i.+ng out in the intellectual heavens which no Franklin has yet or may ever draw and tie to earth by string of kite.

But while there is a living something which no human art has yet been able to grasp and preserve, there is a wonderful joy and comfort in the record of that which the orator said. As we read we see the very picture, though inarticulate, of the living orator. We may never know all the marvelous power of Demosthenes, yet _Proton_, _meg_, _o_ _andres_ _Athenaioi_, suggests something of it. Cicero's silver speech may never reach our ears, and yet who does not love to read _Quousque_ _tandem_ _abutere_, _O_ _Catilina_, _patientia_ _nostra_? So if on the printed page we may not see the living orator, we may look upon his picture--the photograph of his power. And it is this which it is the thought and purpose of this work to present. We mean to photograph the orators of the world, reproducing the words which they spake, and trusting to the vivid imagination of the thoughtful reader to put behind the recorded words the living force and power. In this we shall fill a vacant place in literature. There are countless books of poetry in which the gems of the great poets of the world have been preserved, but oratory has not been thus favored. We have many volumes which record the speeches of different orators, sometimes connected with a biography of their lives and sometimes as independent gatherings of speeches. We have also single books, like Goodrich's 'British Eloquence,' which give us partial selections of the great orations. But this is intended to be universal in its reach, a complete encyclopedia of oratory. The purpose is to present the best efforts of the world's greatest orators in all ages; and with this purpose kept in view as the matter of primary importance, to supplement the great orations with others that are representative and historically important--especially with those having a fundamental connection with the most important events in the development of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The greatest attention has been given to the representative orators of England and America, so that the work includes all that is most famous or most necessary to be known in the oratory of the Anglo-Saxon race. Wherever possible, addresses have been published in extenso. This has been the rule followed in giving the great orations. In dealing with minor orators, the selections made are considerable enough to show the style, method, and spirit.

Where it has been necessary to choose between two orations of equal merit, the one having the greater historical significance has been selected. Of course it would not be possible, keeping within reasonable limits, to give every speech of every one worthy to be called an orator. Indeed, the greatest of orators sometimes failed.

So we have carefully selected only those speeches which manifest the power of eloquence; and this selection, we take pleasure in a.s.suring our readers, has been made by the most competent critics of the country.

We have not confined ourselves to any one profession or field of eloquence. The pulpit, the bar, the halls of legislation, and the popular a.s.sembly have each and all been called upon for their best contributions. The single test has been, is it oratory? the single question, is there eloquence? The reader and student of every cla.s.s will therefore find within these pages that which will satisfy his particular taste and desire in the matter of oratory.

As this work is designed especially for the American reader, we have deemed it proper to give prominence to Anglo-Saxon orators; and yet this prominence has not been carried so far as to make the work a one-sided collection. It is not a mere presentation of American or even of English-speaking orators. We submit the work to the American public in the belief that all will find pleasure, interest, and instruction in its pages, and in the hope that it will prove an Inspiration to the growing generation to see to it that oratory be not cla.s.sed among the "lost arts," but that it shall remain an ever-present and increasing power and blessing to the world.

David J. Brewer

THE ORATORY OF ANGLO-SAXON COUNTRIES

By Edward A. Allen, Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Literature in the University of Missouri

English-speaking people have always been the freest people, the greatest lovers of liberty, the world has ever seen. Long before English history properly begins, the pen of Tacitus reveals to us our forefathers in their old home-land in North Germany beating back the Roman legions under Varus, and staying the progress of Rome's triumphant car whose mighty wheels had crushed Hannibal, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, and countless thousands in every land. The Germanic ancestors of the English nation were the only people who did not bend the neck to these lords of all the world besides. In the year 9, when the Founder of Christianity was playing about his humble home at Nazareth, or watching his father at work in his shop, our forefathers dealt Rome a blow from which she never recovered. As Freeman, late professor of history at Oxford, said in one of his lectures: "In the blow by the Teutoburg wood was the germ of the Declaration of Independence, the germ of the surrender of Yorktown."

Arminius was our first Was.h.i.+ngton, "_haud_ _dubie_ _liberator_," as Tacitus calls him,--the savior of his country.

When the time came for expansion, and our forefathers in the fifth century began the conquest and settlement of the island that was to become their New England, they pushed out the Celts, the native inhabitants of the island, just as their descendants, about twelve hundred years later, were to push out the indigenous people of this continent, to make way for a higher civilization, a larger destiny. No Englishman ever saw an armed Roman in England, and though traces of the Roman conquest may be seen everywhere in that country to-day, it is sometimes forgotten that it was the Britain of the Celts, not the England of the English, which was held for so many centuries as a province of Rome.

The same love of freedom that resisted the Roman invasion in the first home of the English was no less strong in their second home, when Alfred with his brave yeomen withstood the invading Danes at Ashdown and Edington, and saved England from becoming a Danish province. It is true that the Normans, by one decisive battle, placed a French king on the throne of England, but the English spirit of freedom was never subdued; it rose superior to the conquerors of Hastings, and in the end English speech and English freedom gained the mastery.

The sacred flame of freedom has burned in the hearts of the Anglo-Saxon race through all the centuries of our history, and this spirit of freedom is reflected in our language and in our oratory. There never have been wanting English orators when English liberty seemed to be imperiled; indeed, it may be said that the highest oratory has always been coincident with the deepest aspirations of freedom.

It is said of Pitt,--the younger, I believe,--that he was fired to oratory by reading the speeches in Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' These speeches--especially those of Satan, the most human of the characters in this n.o.ble epic,--when a.n.a.lyzed and traced to their source, are neither Hebrew nor Greek, but English to the core. They are imbued with the English spirit, with the spirit of Cromwell, with the spirit that beat down oppression at Marston Moor, and ushered in a freer England at Naseby. In the earlier Milton of a thousand years before, whether the work of Caedmon or of some other English muse, the same spirit is reflected in Anglo-Saxon words. Milton's Satan is more polished, better educated, thanks to Oxford and Cambridge, but the spirit is essentially one with that of the ruder poet; and this spirit, I maintain, is English.

The dry annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are occasionally lighted up with a gleam of true eloquence, as in the description of the battle of Brunanburh, which breaks forth into a pean of victory. Under the year 991, there is mention of a battle at Maldon, between the English and the Danes, in which great heroism must have been displayed, for it inspired at the time one of the most patriotic outbursts of song to be found in the whole range of English literature. During an enforced truce, because of a swollen stream that separated the two armies, a messenger is sent from the Danes to Byrhtnoth, leader of the English forces, with a proposition to purchase peace with English gold. Byrhtnoth, angry and resolute, gave him this answer:--

"Hearest thou, pirate, what this folk sayeth? They will give you spears for tribute, weapons that will avail you nought in battle. Messenger of the vikings, get thee back. Take to thy people a sterner message, that here stands a fearless earl, who with his band wilt defend this land, the home of Aethelred, my prince, folk and fold. Too base it seems to me that ye go without battle to your s.h.i.+ps with our money, now that ye have come thus far into our country. Ye shall not so easily obtain treasure. Spear and sword, grim battle-play, shall decide between us ere we pay tribute."

Though the battle was lost and Byrhtnoth slain, the spirit of the man is an English inheritance. It is the same spirit that refused s.h.i.+p-money to Charles I., and tea-money to George III.

The encroachments of tyranny and the stealthier step of royal prerogative have shrunk before this spirit which through the centuries has inspired the n.o.blest oratory of England and America. It not only inspired the great orators of the mother country, it served at the same time as a bond of sympathy with the American colonies in their struggle for freedom. Burke, throughout his great speech on Conciliation, never lost sight of this idea:--

"This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth. The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your bands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and our English principles. ... The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. ... In order to prove that Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.

. . . As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England wors.h.i.+p freedom they will turn their faces towards you. The more ardently they love liberty the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere--it is a weed that grows in every soil. They can have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you."

So, too, in the speeches of Chatham, the great Commoner, whose eloquence has never been surpa.s.sed, an intense spirit of liberty, the animating principle of his life, s.h.i.+nes out above all things else. Though opposed to the independence of the colonies, he could not restrain his admiration for the spirit they manifested:--

"The Americans contending for their rights against arbitrary exactions I love and admire. It is the struggle of free and virtuous patriots. ... My Lords, you cannot conquer America. You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and acc.u.mulate every a.s.sistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would never lay down my arms--never--never--never!"

Wherever the principle of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the rights of man have been at stake, the all-animating voice of the orator has kept alive the sacred flame. In the witenagemote of the earlier tongs, in the parliament of the later kings, in the Ma.s.sachusetts town-meeting and in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the legislature of every State, and in the Congress of the United States, wherever in Anglo-Saxon countries the torch of liberty seemed to burn low, the breath of the orator has fanned it into flame. It fired the eloquence of Sheridan pleading against Warren Hastings for the down-trodden natives of India in words that have not lost their magnetic charm:--

"My Lords, do you, the judges of this land and the expounders of its rightful laws, do you approve of this mockery and call that the character of Justice which takes the form of right to execute wrong?

No. my Lords, justice is not this halt and miserable object; it is not the ineffective bauble of an Indian paG.o.da; it is not the portentous phantom of despair; it is not like any fabled monster, formed in the eclipse of reason and found in some unhallowed grove of superst.i.tious darkness and political dismay. No, my Lords! In the happy reverse of all this I turn from the disgusting caricature to the real image. Justice I have now before me, august and pure, the abstract ideal of all that would be perfect in the spirits and aspirings of men--where the mind rises; where the heart expands; where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where the favorite att.i.tude is to stoop to the unfortunate, to hear their cry, and help them; to rescue and relieve, to succor and save; majestic from its mercy, venerable from its utility, uplifted without pride, firm without obduracy, beneficent in each preference, lovely though in her frown."

This same spirit fired the enthusiasm of Samuel Adams and James Otis to such a pitch of eloquence that "every man who heard them went away ready to take up arms." It inspired Patrick Henry to hurl his defiant alternative of "liberty or death" in the face of unyielding despotism. It inspired that great-hearted patriot and orator, Henry Clay, in the first quarter of this century, to plead, single-handed and alone, in the Congress of the United States, session after session before the final victory was won, for the recognition of the provinces of South America in their struggle for independence.

"I may be accused of an imprudent utterance of my feelings on this occasion. I care not: when the independence, the happiness, the liberty of a whole people is at stake, and that people our neighbors, our brethren, occupying a portion of the same continent, imitating our example, and partic.i.p.ating in the same sympathies with ourselves. I will boldly avow my feelings and my wishes in their behalf, even at the hazard of such an imputation. I maintain that an oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. This was the great principle of the English revolution. It was the great principle of our own. Spanish-America has been doomed for centuries to the practical effects of an odious tyranny. If we were justified, she is more than justified. I am no propagandist. I would not seek to force upon other nations our principles and our liberty, if they do not want them. But if an abused and oppressed people will their freedom; if they seek to establish it; if, in truth, they have established it, we have a right, as a sovereign power, to notice the fact, and to act as circ.u.mstances and our interest require. I will say in the language of the venerated father of my country, 'born in a land of liberty, my anxious recollections, my sympathetic feelings, and my best wishes, are irresistibly excited, whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.'"

This same spirit loosed the tongue of Wendell Phillips to plead the cause of the enslaved African in words that burned into the hearts of his countrymen. It emboldened George William Curtis to a.s.sert the right to break the shackles of party politics and follow the dictates of conscience:--

"I know,--no man better,--how hard it is for earnest men to separate their country from their party, or their religion from their sect. But, nevertheless, the welfare of the country is dearer than the mere victory of party, as truth is more precious than the interest of any sect. You will hear this patriotism scorned as an impracticable theory, as the dream of a cloister, as the whim of a fool. But such was the folly of the Spartan Leonidas, staying with his three hundred the Persian horde, and teaching Greece the self-reliance that saved her. Such was the folly of the Swiss Arnold von Winkelried, gathering into his own breast the points of Austrian spears, making his dead body the bridge of victory for his countrymen. Such was the folly of the American Nathan Hale, gladly risking the seeming disgrace of his name, and grieving that be had but one life to give for his country. Such are the beacon-lights of a pure patriotism that burn forever in men's memories and answer each other through the illuminated ages."

So long as there are wrongs to be redressed, so long as the strong oppress the weak, so long as injustice sits in high places, the voice of the orator will be needed to plead for the rights of man. He may not, at this stage of the republic, be called upon to sound a battle cry to arms, but there are bloodless victories to be won as essential to the stability of a great nation and the uplifting of its millions of people as the victories of the battlefield.

When the greatest of modern political philosophers, the author of the Declaration of Independence, urged that, if men were left free to declare the truth the effect of its great positive forces would overcome the negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the central fact of civilization. Without freedom of thought and absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be no advancement, no high civilization. To the orator who has heard the call of humanity, what n.o.bler aspiration than to enlarge and extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, and to defend the hope of the world?

Edward A. Allen

PIERRE ABELARD (1079-1142)

Abelard's reputation for oratory and for scholars.h.i.+p was so great that he attracted hearers and disciples from all quarters. They encamped around him like an army and listened to him with such eagerness that the jealousy of some and the honest apprehension of others were excited by the boldness with which he handled religious subjects. He has been called the originator of modern rationalism, and though he was apparently worsted in his contest with his great rival, St. Bernard, he remains the most real and living personality among the great pulpit orators of the Middle Ages. This is due in large part, no doubt, to his connection with the unfortunate Heloise. That story, one of the most romantic, as it is one of the saddest of human history, must be pa.s.sed over with a mere mention of the fact that it gave occasion for a number of the sermons of Abelard which have come down to us. Several of those were preached in the convent of the Paraclete of which Heloise became abbess,-- where, in his old age, her former lover, broken with the load of a life of most extraordinary sorrows, went to die. These sermons do not suggest the fire and force with which young Abelard appealed to France, compelling its admiration even in exciting its alarm, but they prevent him from being a mere name as an orator.

He was born near Nantes, A. D. 1079. At his death in 1142, he was buried in the convent of the Paraclete, where the body of Heloise was afterwards buried at his side.

The extracts from his sermons here given were translated by Rev. J. M. Neale, of Sackville College, from the first collected edition of the works of Abelard, published at Paris in 1616. There are thirty-two such sermons extant. They were preached in Latin, or, at least, they have come down to us in that language.

THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS

The Lord performed that miracle once for all in the body which much more blessedly he performs every day in the souls of penitents. He restored life to Lazarus, but it was a temporal life, one that would die again. He bestows life on the penitent; life, but it is life that will remain, world without end. The one is wonderful in the eyes of men; the other is far more wonderful in the judgment of the faithful; and in that it is so much the greater, by so much the more is it to be sought. This is written of Lazarus, not for Lazarus himself, but for us and to us. "Whatsoever things," saith the Apostle, "were written of old, were written for our learning." The Lord called Lazarus once, and he was raised from temporal death. He calls us often, that we may rise from the death of the soul. He said to him once, "Come forth!" and immediately he came forth at one command of the Lord. The Lord every day invites us by Scripture to confession, exhorts us to amendment, promises the life which is prepared for us by him who willeth not the death of a sinner. We neglect his call, we despise his invitation, we contemn his promise.

Placed between G.o.d and the devil, as between a father and a foe, we prefer the enticement of the enemy to a father's warning. "We are not ignorant," says the Apostle, "of the devices of Satan,"--the devices, I say, by which he induces us to sin, and keeps us back from repentance. Suggesting sin, he deprives us of two things by which the best a.s.sistance might be offered to us, namely, shame and fear. For that which we avoid, we avoid either through fear of some loss, or through the reverence of shame.... When, therefore, Satan impels any one to sin, he easily accomplishes the object, if, as we have said, he first deprives him of fear and shame. And when he has effected that, he restores the same things, but in another sense, which he has taken away; that so he may keep back the sinner from confession, and make him die in his sin. Then he secretly whispers into his soul: "Priests are light-minded, and it is a difficult thing to check the tongue. If you tell this or that to them, it cannot remain a secret; and when it shall have been published abroad, you will incur the danger of losing your good character, or bearing some injury, and being confounded from your own vileness."

Thus the devil deceives that wretched man; he first takes from him that by which he ought to avoid sin, and then restores the same thing, and by it retains him in sin. His captive fears temporal, and not spiritual, evil; he is ashamed before men and he despises G.o.d. He is ashamed that things should come to the knowledge of men which he was not ashamed to commit in the sight of G.o.d, and of the whole heavenly host. He trembles at the judgment of man, and he has no respect to that of G.o.d. Of which the Apostle says: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living G.o.d"; and the Truth saith himself, "Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but fear him rather who can cast body and soul into h.e.l.l."

There are diseases of the soul, as there are of the body; and therefore the Divine mercy has provided beforehand physicians for both. Our Lord Jesus Christ saith, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." His priests now hold his place in the Church, to whom, as unto physicians of the soul, we ought to confess our sins, that we may receive from them the plaister of satisfaction. He that fears the death of the body, in whatever part of the body he may suffer, however much he may be ashamed of the disease, makes no delay in revealing it to the physician, and setting it forth, so that it may be cured. However rough, however hard may be the remedy, he avoids it not, so that he may escape death. Whatever he has that is most precious, he makes no hesitation in giving it, if only for a little while he may put off the death of the body. What, then, ought we to do for the death of the soul? For this, however terrible, may be forever prevented, without such great labor, without such great expense. The Lord seeks us ourselves, and not what is ours. He stands in no need of our wealth who bestows all things. For it is he to whom it is said, "My goods are nothing unto thee." With him a man is by so much the greater, as, in his own judgment, he is less. With him a man is as much the more righteous, as in his own opinion he is the more guilty. In his eyes we hide our faults all the more, the more that here by confession we manifest them.

THE LAST ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM

"He came unto his own, and his own received him not." That is, he entered Jerusalem. Yet now he entered, not Jerusalem, which by interpretation is "The Vision of Peace," but the home of tyranny. For now the elders of the city have so manifestly conspired against him, that he can no longer find a place of refuge within it. This is not to be attributed to his helplessness but to his patience. He could be harbored there securely, seeing that no one can do him harm by violence, and that he has the power to incline the hearts of men whither he wills. For in that same city he freely did whatever he willed to do; and when he sent his disciples thither, and commanded them that they should loose the a.s.s and the colt, and bring them to him, and said that no man would forbid them, he accomplished that which he said, although he was not ignorant of the conspiracy against himself. Of which he saith to his disciples whom he sends, "Go ye into the castle over against you"; that is, to the place which is equally opposed to G.o.d and to you; no longer to be called a city, an a.s.sembly of men living under the law, but a castle of tyrannical fortification. Go confidently, saith he, into the place, though such it is, and though it is therefore opposed to you, and do with all security that which I command you. Whence he adds, also: "And if any man say aught unto you, say that the Lord hath need of them, and he will straightway send them away." A wonderful confidence of power! As if the Lord, using his own right of command, lays his own injunction on those whom he knows already to have conspired for his death. Thus he commands, thus he enjoins, thus he compels obedience. Nor do they who are sent hesitate in accomplis.h.i.+ng that which is laid upon them, confident as they are in the strength of the power of him who sends them. By that power they who were chiefly concerned in this conspiracy had been more than once ejected from the Temple, where many were not able to resist one. And they, too, after this ejection and conspiracy, as we have said, when he was daily teaching in the Temple, knew how intrepid he showed himself to be, into whose hands the Father had given all things. And last of all, when he desired to celebrate the Pa.s.sover in the same night in which he had foreordained to be betrayed, he again sent his Disciples whither he willed, and prepared a home for himself in the city itself, wherein he might keep the feast. He, then, who so often showed his power in such things as these, now also, if he had desired it, could have prepared a home wherever he would, and had no need to return to Bethany. Therefore, he did these two things intentionally: he showed that they whom he avoided were unworthy of his dwelling among them; and he gave himself, in the last hours of his life, to his beloved hosts, that they might have their own reception of him as the reward of their hospitality.