CHAPTER XXIV

INFLUENCING BY PERSUASION

                       She hath prosperous art
    When she will play with reason and discourse,
    And well she can persuade.

—­SHAKESPEARE, Measure for Measure.

Him we call an artist who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of a piano,—­who seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears.  Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may,—­coarse or refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions in the keeping of a confessor or with their opinions in their bank safes,—­he will have them pleased and humored as he chooses; and they shall carry and execute what he bids them.

    —­RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essay on Eloquence.

More good and more ill have been effected by persuasion than by any other form of speech. It is an attempt to influence by means of appeal to some particular interest held important by the hearer. Its motive may be high or low, fair or unfair, honest or dishonest, calm or passionate, and hence its scope is unparalleled in public speaking.

This “instilment of conviction,” to use Matthew Arnold’s expression, is naturally a complex process in that it usually includes argumentation and often employs suggestion, as the next chapter will illustrate.  In fact, there is little public speaking worthy of the name that is not in some part persuasive, for men rarely speak solely to alter men’s opinions—­the ulterior purpose is almost always action.

The nature of persuasion is not solely intellectual, but is largely emotional.  It uses every principle of public speaking, and every “form of discourse,” to use a rhetorician’s expression, but argument supplemented by special appeal is its peculiar quality.  This we may best see by examining

The Methods of Persuasion

High-minded speakers often seek to move their hearers to action by an appeal to their highest motives, such as love of liberty.  Senator Hoar, in pleading for action on the Philippine question, used this method: 

What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and your sentimentalities?  You have wasted nearly six hundred millions of treasure.  You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—­the flower of our youth.  You have devastated provinces.  You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.  You have established reconcentration camps.  Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind.  You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and