So cast out fear, for fear is cowardly—­when it is not mastered.  The bravest know fear, but they do not yield to it.  Face your audience pluckily—­if your knees quake, MAKE them stop.  In your audience lies some victory for you and the cause you represent.  Go win it.  Suppose Charles Martell had been afraid to hammer the Saracen at Tours; suppose Columbus had feared to venture out into the unknown West; suppose our forefathers had been too timid to oppose the tyranny of George the Third; suppose that any man who ever did anything worth while had been a coward!  The world owes its progress to the men who have dared, and you must dare to speak the effective word that is in your heart to speak—­for often it requires courage to utter a single sentence.  But remember that men erect no monuments and weave no laurels for those who fear to do what they can.

Is all this unsympathetic, do you say?

Man, what you need is not sympathy, but a push.  No one doubts that temperament and nerves and illness and even praiseworthy modesty may, singly or combined, cause the speaker’s cheek to blanch before an audience, but neither can any one doubt that coddling will magnify this weakness.  The victory lies in a fearless frame of mind.  Prof.  Walter Dill Scott says:  “Success or failure in business is caused more by mental attitude even than by mental capacity.”  Banish the fear-attitude; acquire the confident attitude.  And remember that the only way to acquire it is—­to acquire it.

In this foundation chapter we have tried to strike the tone of much that is to follow.  Many of these ideas will be amplified and enforced in a more specific way; but through all these chapters on an art which Mr. Gladstone believed to be more powerful than the public press, the note of justifiable self-confidence must sound again and again.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.

1.  What is the cause of self-consciousness?

2.  Why are animals free from it?

3.  What is your observation regarding self-consciousness in children?

4.  Why are you free from it under the stress of unusual excitement?

5.  How does moderate excitement affect you?

6.  What are the two fundamental requisites for the acquiring of self-confidence?  Which is the more important?

7.  What effect does confidence on the part of the speaker have on the audience?

8.  Write out a two-minute speech on “Confidence and Cowardice.”

9.  What effect do habits of thought have on confidence?  In this connection read the chapter on “Right Thinking and Personality.”

10.  Write out very briefly any experience you may have had involving the teachings of this chapter.

11.  Give a three-minute talk on “Stage-Fright,” including a (kindly) imitation of two or more victims.

CHAPTER II