You must concentrate by resolutely withdrawing your attention from everything else.  If you concentrate your thought on a pain which may be afflicting you, that pain will grow more intense.  “Count your blessings” and they will multiply.  Center your thought on your strokes and your tennis play will gradually improve.  To concentrate is simply to attend to one thing, and attend to nothing else.  If you find that you cannot do that, there is something wrong—­attend to that first.  Remove the cause and the symptom will disappear.  Read the chapter on “Will Power.”  Cultivate your will by willing and then doing, at all costs.  Concentrate—­and you will win.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1.  Select from any source several sentences suitable for speaking aloud; deliver them first in the manner condemned in this chapter, and second with due regard for emphasis toward the close of each sentence.

2.  Put into about one hundred words your impression of the effect produced.

3.  Tell of any peculiar methods you may have observed or heard of by which speakers have sought to aid their powers of concentration, such as looking fixedly at a blank spot in the ceiling, or twisting a watch charm.

4.  What effect do such habits have on the audience?

5.  What relation does pause bear to concentration?

6.  Tell why concentration naturally helps a speaker to change pitch, tempo, and emphasis.

7.  Read the following selection through to get its meaning and spirit clearly in your mind.  Then read it aloud, concentrating solely on the thought that you are expressing—­do not trouble about the sentence or thought that is coming.  Half the troubles of mankind arise from anticipating trials that never occur.  Avoid this in speaking.  Make the end of your sentences just as strong as the beginning. CONCENTRATE.

    WAR!

    The last of the savage instincts is war.  The cave man’s club
    made law and procured food.  Might decreed right.  Warriors were
    saviours.

In Nazareth a carpenter laid down the saw and preached the brotherhood of man.  Twelve centuries afterwards his followers marched to the Holy Land to destroy all who differed with them in the worship of the God of Love.  Triumphantly they wrote “In Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”

History is an appalling tale of war.  In the seventeenth century Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain warred for thirty years.  At Magdeburg 30,000 out of 36,000 were killed regardless of sex or age.  In Germany schools were closed for a third of a century, homes burned, women outraged, towns demolished, and the untilled land became a wilderness.

Two-thirds of Germany’s property was destroyed and 18,000,000 of her citizens were