Memorizing a Speech

Now let us try to put into practise the foregoing suggestions.  First, reread this chapter, noting the nine ways by which memorizing may be helped.

Then read over the following selection from Beecher, applying so many of the suggestions as are practicable.  Get the spirit of the selection firmly in your mind.  Make mental note of—­write down, if you must—­the succession of ideas.  Now memorize the thought.  Then memorize the outline, the order in which the different ideas are expressed.  Finally, memorize the exact wording.

No, when you have done all this, with the most faithful attention to directions, you will not find memorizing easy, unless you have previously trained your memory, or it is naturally retentive.  Only by constant practise will memory become strong and only by continually observing these same principles will it remain strong.  You will, however, have made a beginning, and that is no mean matter.

    THE REIGN OF THE COMMON PEOPLE

I do not suppose that if you were to go and look upon the experiment of self-government in America you would have a very high opinion of it.  I have not either, if I just look upon the surface of things.  Why, men will say:  “It stands to reason that 60,000,000 ignorant of law, ignorant of constitutional history, ignorant of jurisprudence, of finance, and taxes and tariffs and forms of currency—­60,000,000 people that never studied these things—­are not fit to rule.”  Your diplomacy is as complicated as ours, and it is the most complicated on earth, for all things grow in complexity as they develop toward a higher condition.  What fitness is there in these people?  Well, it is not democracy merely; it is a representative democracy.  Our people do not vote in mass for anything; they pick out captains of thought, they pick out the men that do know, and they send them to the Legislature to think for them, and then the people afterward ratify or disallow them.

But when you come to the Legislature I am bound to confess that the thing does not look very much more cheering on the outside.  Do they really select the best men?  Yes; in times of danger they do very generally, but in ordinary time, “kissing goes by favor.”  You know what the duty of a regular Republican-Democratic legislator is.  It is to get back again next winter.  His second duty is what?  His second duty is to put himself under that extraordinary providence that takes care of legislators’ salaries.  The old miracle of the prophet and the meal and the oil is outdone immeasurably in our days, for they go there poor one year, and go home rich; in four years they become moneylenders, all by a trust in that gracious providence that takes care of legislators’ salaries.  Their next duty after that is to serve the party that sent them up, and then, if there is anything left of them, it belongs to the commonwealth.  Someone has said very wisely, that if a man traveling wishes to relish his dinner he had better not go into the kitchen to see where it is cooked; if a man wishes to respect and obey the law, he had better not go to the Legislature to see where that is cooked.

    —­HENRY WARD BEECHER.