I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood.  This man never broke his word.  “No Retaliation” was his great motto and the rule of his life; and the last words uttered to his son in France were these:  “My boy, you will one day go back to Santo Domingo; forget that France murdered your father.”  I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave.  I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves.  This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.

You think me a fanatic to-night, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices.  But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Lafayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.

    —­WENDELL PHILLIPS, Toussaint l’Ouverture.

Practise on the following selections for emphasis:  Beecher’s “Abraham Lincoln,” page 76; Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Speech,” page 50; Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict,” page 67; and Bryan’s “Prince of Peace,” page 448.

CHAPTER IV

EFFICIENCY THROUGH CHANGE OF PITCH

Speech is simply a modified form of singing:  the principal difference being in the fact that in singing the vowel sounds are prolonged and the intervals are short, whereas in speech the words are uttered in what may be called “staccato” tones, the vowels not being specially prolonged and the intervals between the words being more distinct.  The fact that in singing we have a larger range of tones does not properly distinguish it from ordinary speech.  In speech we have likewise a variation of tones, and even in ordinary conversation there is a difference of from three to six semi-tones, as I have found in my investigations, and in some persons the range is as high as one octave.

    —­WILLIAM SCHEPPEGRELL, Popular Science Monthly.

By pitch, as everyone knows, we mean the relative position of a vocal tone—­as, high, medium, low, or any variation between.  In public speech we apply it not only to a single utterance, as an exclamation or a monosyllable (Oh! or the) but to any group of syllables, words, and even sentences that may be spoken in a single tone.  This distinction it is important to keep in mind, for the efficient speaker not only changes the pitch of successive syllables (see Chapter VII, “Efficiency through Inflection"), but gives a different pitch to different parts, or word-groups, of successive sentences.  It is this phase of the subject which we are considering in this chapter.