EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Author of "The Man Without a JOHN B. GORDON, Former United States Senator. NATHAN HASKELL DOLE, Associate Editor "International JAMES B. POND, Manager Lecture Bureau; Author of "Eccen- GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER, Professor of English Literature, LORENZO SEARS, Professor of English Literature, Brown Uni- EDWIN M. BACON, Former Editor "Boston Advertiser" and "Boston Post." J. WALKER MCSPADDEN, Managing Editor "Édition Royale" of Balzac's Works. F. CUNLIFFE OWEN, Member Editorial Staff "New York TRUMAN A. DEWEESE, Member Editorial Staff "Chicago CHAMP CLARK, Member of Congress from Missouri. MARCUS BENJAMIN, Editor, National Museum, Washington, D. C. CLARK HOWELL, Editor "Atlanta Constitution." EPIPHANIUS WILSON, Managing Editor. NOTE.-A large number of the most distinguished speakers of this country and Great Britain have selected their own best speeches for this Library. These speakers include Whitelaw Reid, William Jennings Bryan, Henry van Dyke, Henry M. Stanley, Newell Dwight Hillis, Joseph Jefferson, Sir Henry Irving, Arthur T. Hadley, John D. Long, David Starr Jordan, and many others of equal note. GENERAL INTRODUCTION ORA RATORY, according to Aristotle, is an art subordinately included in that master art of politics or statesmanship, by which states are constituted, controlled, and developed. In its most general character, as implying the public expression of opinion and feeling in language at once fitting, clear, and ornate,* oratory, like poetry, is an eternal concomitant of human life, activity, and progress. The public utterances in which the leaders of their fellow men have expressed their thoughts and aspirations, have uttered their warnings, and revealed their hopes, have proved themselves to be directors of popular enthusiasm, inspirers of self-sacrifice, and exemplars of national greatness, thus form a long and closely linked succession in the department of universal literature, in which the voice of to-day is often little more than the echo of some daring prophet, innovator, or reformer in the past. The first orators of Greece were poets, and while Solon the legislator corrected and enlightened his Athenian fellow countrymen in Homeric hexameters, Tyrtæus by his war songs roused to battle the less volatile minds of the Lacedæmonians. How near the present is to the past is proved by the fact that only in recent history do we read that the British government caused the verses of the Spartan poet to be translated from Greek into English and recited in the hearing of its red-coated squadrons, in the hope of infusing into them the spirit of those who fought and fell at Thermopylæ, twenty-five centuries before. It is necessary that we should consider oratory, and especially political oratory, from this point of view, in order to fully understand its dignity and importance. We must * Oratoris est apte, distincte, ornate, dicere.-Cic. |