I

but they will not convince an audience. The true orator must be a real thinker, and he must think clearly and practically if he would really produce permanent effects. Wendell Phillips was one of the greatest orators I have ever heard. I think I should put him second only to Henry Ward Beecher. heard him deliver an address in Watertown, Massachusetts, directly after the brutal assault of Preston Brooks on Charles Sumner. The reader of to-day cannot easily conceive how deeply stirred was the State of Massachusetts by that crime, nor conceive how profoundly stirred was the Massachusetts audience by the restrained eloquence of Massachusetts' greatest orator, the Mark Antony of his time. But his speech was wholly ineffective, because when we came away from his indictment of the slave power and thought over his address we discovered that the only remedy which he proposed was that Massachusetts should call home her Senators and Representatives and secede from the Union-a remedy which was instantly rejected by our sober second thought.

Mr. Beecher was a profound thinker. By that I mean he thought things through, and rarely if ever spoke on any topic unless he had first thoroughly pondered it. But if he was not superficial, neither was he obscure or subtle or scholastic. He had common sense; that is, the point of view of the common people. He understood his fellow-men, and if he did not agree with them-and he often did not-he saw the problems as they saw them and so approached the problems in intellectual sympathy with them. This common sense prevented him from being either an agitator or a doctrinaire. He has been often called an abolitionist, but he was not an abolitionist. The doctrine of the abolitionist was defined by William Lloyd Garrison as "the duty of immediate and unconditional emancipation." Mr. Beecher did not believe in the duty of immediate and unconditional emancipation. He saw that it was both politically and morally impracticable. He saw that in many cases it would have been a cowardly evasion of duty; that the duty of the slaveholder was not to throw his slaves unprepared for self-support upon a community unwilling to give them a chance for self-support, but to stay with them and care for them in slavery until slavery, by lawful and peaceable methods, could be abolished. He held and urged upon the community the doctrine of William H. Seward, Samuel P.

Chase, and Abraham Lincoln; the duty of prohibiting the further extension of slavery, and trusting to natural processes for its ultimate peaceful extinction.

So, after the Civil War was over, he refused to follow the doctrinaires in their endeavor to establish in the South, without any previous preparation, State governments founded on universal suffrage. Though he believed in universal suffrage as an ultimate fact, he saw clearly that the first duty of the Union was to promote good feeling between the North and the South and between the blacks and the whites in the South. He refused, therefore, to follow such men as Stevens in his radical reconstruction policy. "The Radicals," he once said to me, "are trying to drive the wedge into the log buttend foremost, and they will only split their beetle." This common sense kept him in touch with the common people, and, always seeking to lead them to a practical result, gave to his orations a real and permanent efficiency. Perhaps no episode in his career more strikingly illustrates this characteristic of his ministry than his orations in England, which did so much to revolutionize the public sentiment of that country and convert hostility into friendship for the National cause.

But thought, however profound and however practical and however efficacious its instrument, does not make a great orator unless it is surcharged with emotion. Thought guides, emotion moves; thought makes a teacher, emotion is necessary to the orator; for men are not governed by their intellect, they are governed by their motive powers. The intellect is the pilot, the motive powers are the engines, and without powerful engines a great community lacks steerageway. Mr. Beecher was a man of strong emotions. As a cloudburst in the West will suddenly convert the dry bed of mountain streams into a roaring torrent, so I have seen Mr. Beecher fill the hearts of a before apathetic audience with almost tempestuous emotion. A striking illustration of this emotional power of Mr. Beecher is afforded by the well-known incident of his raising $2,200 to free two Negro girls. I copy, condensing, a picture of this scene from the "Life of Henry Ward Beecher " already quoted :

"Mr. Beecher's speech is described by an eye-witness, himself a minister, as beyond anything he had ever heard before or since. He extemporized there on the stage an auction of a Christian slave. The enumeration

of the slave's qualities by the auctioneer and the bids that followed were given by the speaker in perfect character. He made the scene as realistic as one of Hogarth's pictures and as lurid as a Rembrandt. . . . The audience were wrought up to a perfect frenzy of excitement while that picture was being drawn, and when real contributions instead of imaginary bids were called for, the sum was easily raised and the girls were free."

Nor was it only or chiefly in such dramatic scenes that the emotional power of the orator was felt. In Plymouth Church the seats of the pewholders were thrown open to the public ten minutes before the hour for service to begin. These ten minutes were occupied in social conversation and in seating strangers, and the consequent confusion was apt to continue to a greater or less extent during the singing of the opening anthem. But when Mr. Beecher arose to offer the invocation, which was always uttered in a quiet and comparatively low tone of voice, though with carrying power which made it audible throughout the great church if the church was still, an instant hush fell over the assembly, and when the invocation was closed the social audience had already been transformed into a worshiping congregation.

Powerful, however, as Mr. Beecher's emotions were, he never lost control of them. He never laughed at his own humor, he never wept at his own pathos, and he never lost mastery over himself in his moments of intensest indignation. The emotions were strong, but the will which controlled them was stronger. There is no better way for a preacher to prevent the tears of his congregation from flowing than to allow his own tears to flow.

True oratory has always a quality of spontaneity. However thorough the preparation, the true oration is always a product of and an expression fitted to the occasion. It was this lack of spontaneity which prevented Edward Everett from being a great orator. It was this spontaneity which made, in contrast with Edward Everett's carefully prepared address, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg speech a great oration. The following incident, reported to me by a friend, and told here in his words, illustrates this quality of spontaneity, a quality which characterized, with very rare exceptions, all of Mr. Beechrmons, and made him far greater as a 'r than as a lecturer:

. Beecher told me that on one of his

lecture tours in the Central West he came to some city on Saturday night, and. as he never traveled on Sunday, he stopped to spend the day there. He went to the morning service in one of the Presbyterian churches and sat by the door. A young professor from Princeton preached a sermon which was, in effect, an appeal for the Seminary. Mr. Beecher said, the moment he saw the young man, his heart went out to him, for he knew him to be a spiritual gentleman; but the moment he began to preach it was quite clear that he had no more power of communication than a porcelain stove. The sermon utterly lacked personality and touched no one. As he sat down,' Mr. Beecher said, I was so engrossed in my thought of him, and so full of sympathy, that I stood up. The pastor of the church saw me, called attention to my presence, and said the congregation would be very glad if I would come forward and say something. I went forward without stopping to think. When I found myself in the pulpit, I realized that I was called upon to make a plea for Princeton Seminary. In one way it was a humorous situation. But I thought of the young man, so I made the best plea I could. I described the pioneer work of the young men of Scotch and Irish descent who went out from the Seminary in the early days to lay the foundations of Church and State in the Central and South-West. I described their heroism and self-denial. Then I made a plea to the fathers and mothers who had sons dedicated to the ministry, and the sons who had died. I pleaded with men of wealth without sons, with single women of means who had been eager to do something actively in the world and had been denied the opportunity, and I urged them to endow some one to speak for them.' If I remember rightly, he said the collection was $13,000.

"I asked him how the Presbyterian papers treated him, and he smiled and said: 'Oh, very much as a cat treats a bumblebee.'

Deep, earnest, and sincere feeling, coupled with clear and sane thinking, makes a strong personality, and when this personality possesses dramatic action, skill in the use of language, a well-trained voice of varying compass, and a vigorous physique of not easily exhausted nervous energy, a great orator is constituted, and the influence of such oratory survives not only the man but also his fame. The country has gradually come back from the disastrous period of reconstruction to the

statesmanlike views urged in vain upon the Nation by Henry Ward Beecher at the close of the Civil War, and the Church is founding its theology to-day upon that faith in the love of God as revealed through Jesus Christ

which is gradually changing the message of the Christian Church in America from the proclamation of law enforced by fear to a gospel of love inspired by hope and inspiring to joyous service.

N

O one has any business, perhaps, to offer an apology for idlers when Robert Louis Stevenson has already attended to that kindly task. And yet, in the quarter-century since he wrote his delightful essay, strenuous living has made such evil headway that the idler has lost face entirely, and must needs again be encouraged in his genial shortcoming.

This matter of idling is not quite so simple as it seems; and enforced idleness, having no spontaneity about it, should never be confused with the real thing. True idling comes from within; and to have the proper flavor should always be indulged in at the expense of a duty. There should be in one's subconsciousness a persistent but unheeded tug towards something left undone, just as there should be shadows under the trees to enhance the brilliant splendor of the sun. True idling is a bold breaking away from active aggressiveness to indulge for a time in a passive receptivity, as when one lays aside the noisome pestilence known as a grass-cutter to throw one's self at length upon the fragrant sward with soul and senses open to the benign influences of the summer day. There is still to-morrow in which to finish cutting the grass-there has always been a to-morrow since the world began-but how can one be sure that ever again will come that evanescent mood of quiet ecstasy and of ecstatic quiet which is the divine right of idlers?

But, asks a fussy objector, even if to-morrow is sure to come and the grass to wait, how can you endure to waste so much timne doing nothing? Upon which the true idler (who is never lazy, be it known, but always ready to pay Peter back what was borrowed for Paul) springs up indignantly to explain that not for a minute was he doing nothing! Or at least not your kind of nothing! And

by way of illustrating his meaning he will quote Pliny's letter to his friend Minucius. Minucius, it seems, is doing the thousand and one things that crop up daily in a busy lawyer's life at Rome, trying cases, seeing clients, signing wills, attending weddings or funerals or coming-out parties-so much "noise, inane discourse, and inept labor "while Pliny has fled to the country to save his life from broken trifles by an honest spell of idling in the wide spaces and the serene sunshine. And how much better," he exclaims, winking slyly, no doubt, as he wields his stylus, otiosum esse quam nihil agere!" -to do nothing than to do nothings!

For, as Zona Gale says, "to idle is to inhibit the body and let the spirit keep on." Alas! in how many factories, stores, offices, kitchens, is it the spirit which is inhibited while the body keeps on. And in cars, and in churches, and at lectures, even at afternoon teas, one sees only too frequently cases of all-round inhibition; but for Heaven's sake don't call this idling! Idling in the true sense is a gracious, not an inane, thing. It is what Pliny did at his villa; it is what Wordsworth did when he came upon a.crowd of golden daffodils; it is what you do when, with your pipe, you sit out a serene hour of leisure snatched from a dull day of labor; it is what I do when I pause between tasks to ponder upon imponderable things and breathe a spiritual ozone. Surely our spirits, happily unhampered for the moment, reap a harvest not measurable in dollars or bushels. Let us disabuse our minds of the thought that the man who leans a quiet quarter-hour over one of June's fences to watch a daisy-bud unbutton itself with rosy fingers is of necessity any more of a time-waster than he who frets the day from dawn till dusk with nagging busy

ness.

and value which prevails generally in the community. The cut price appeals only to persons who recognize it as lower than a well-known higher price which they have customarily paid for the article in question. It represents a revolt against the attempt of the manufacturer to sell his goods on a one-priceto-all basis. In reality, therefore, the pricecutter is a reversion to the time antedating Mr. Stewart's famous reform.

Mr. Stewart evidently believed that, while there were many business transactions in which bargaining was necessary and useful, in his business relations with the public over the counter of his store bargaining had no place; and the public has agreed with him ever since that time. To-day the manufacturer takes an analogous stand, as we shall

see.

And the question is whether this, too, is another advance in business methods that should be welcomed as generally beneficial.

Not all price-cutting is destructive or injurious. It is often necessary to sell goods far below the ordinary price; as, for instance, when a merchant retires from business, or becomes bankrupt, or removes his business. In exigencies of this kind a merchant must convert his goods into money with as little delay as possible, and at whatever price he can obtain for them. With such cutting of prices, when so actually necessary, no one has any quarrel. It does not destroy trade or property, and the necessity for this selling at a lower price is evident. The price-cutting to which objection is made, and which many believe to be against the interests of the public, is always unnecessary. To do it successfully involves capital. It is the act of a prosperous merchant and not of one involved in difficulties or retiring from business. Its object is not to convert merchandise into money quickly, but to advertise; not to give the public an opportunity to buy cheaply, but to decoy customers into the advertiser's shop for the purpose of buying, not the article on which the price is cut, but the articles which are sold sufficiently above the normal price to make up for the loss which the advertiser voluntarily takes upon the article the price of which he has lowered.

The true effect of this method of merchandising cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the changes which have come about in the last twenty-five years in the method of selling and distributing goods. Some years ago the influence of the retailer on merchandising was entirely different from

what it is to-day, and an accurate realization of his present relation to the selling and distribution of goods is absolutely essential to any discussion of this price problem. Until very recently the quality of practically all goods on the retailer's shelves was an open question. About all that the consumer knew about them was that the dealer had thought well enough of them to put them in his stock. They bore no brand or guarantee. The consumer had to decide for himself, often with the dealer's urging and advice, as to quality. This sort of merchandising still exists in an exaggerated form on the East Side of New York, where one often sees the customer pulling, weighing, tasting, smelling, and otherwise testing the goods offered, while the dealer with waving arms delivers his encomiums on the exceptional merits of his wares.

To-day a reasonable guarantee of quality is an essential to the success of most lines of goods, and it is the maker and not the retailer who assumes this burden. The retailer may, and does, still advise as to the merits of various competing articles, but the final competition comes after the article is sold and put into use and its value is compared by the customer with that of some rival article meeting the same need. The great change in these buying or shopping conditions is shown by the fact that twenty years ago most of the buying for the family was done by the husband, and necessarily so, for every purchase presented an opportunity for the shrewd salesman to take advantage of an unwary buyer. To-day, on the contrary, careful statistics show that about 86 per cent of the retail buying is done by the women of the household. This change has come about because buying now can be safely done even by children in many instances, because the quality of the goods sold under the various brands and trade-marks is known to all.

The most important consideration, so far as the public is concerned, is of course that the play of the laws of competition shall not be suppressed or curtailed; that the consumer should be afforded an opportunity to choose from and inspect as large a number of the articles as possible which are on sale to meet the purpose for which he is buying. If this be true, this end will by no means be met by merely affording an opportunity to retailers to sell the goods on their shelves at any price they see fit. In addition, there must be preserved, by some method, an opportunity by