Bell, John 1797-1869
 Against Extremists, North and South
 Transcontinental Railroads

Benjamin, Judah P. 1811-1884
 Farewell to the Union
 Slavery as Established by Law

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 Massachusetts 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 flashing 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