Schriner, the great animal painter, painted the picture of a bony mule eating a tuft of hay.  That picture sold in Petersburg, Russia, for fifteen thousand dollars, while the original mule sold for one dollar and thirty cents.  If the painting of Schriner made in the price of that mule, a difference of fourteen thousand, nine hundred, ninety-eight dollars and seventy cents why is not word painting worth something?

Listen, while I give you a short extract from the address of James G. Blaine at the memorial service of our martyr President Garfield.  With the audience wrought up to the greatest sympathy by his tribute he said: 

“Surely if happiness can come from robust health, ideal domestic life and honors of the world James A. Garfield was a happy man that July morning.  One moment strong, erect with promise of peaceful, useful years of life before him:  The next moment wounded, bleeding, helpless.

“Through the days and weeks of agony that followed, he saw his sun slowly sinking, the plans and purposes of his life broken and the sweetest of household ties soon to be severed.

“Masterful in mortal weakness he became the center of a nation’s love, and enshrined in the prayers of the Christian world.

“As the end drew near, his youthful yearning for the sea returned.  The White House palace of power became a hospital of pain.  He begged to be taken from its prison walls and stifling air.

“Silently, tenderly the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea.  There with wan face lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked wistfully out upon the changing wonders of the ocean; its far-off sails white in the morning light; its restless waves rolling shoreward to break in the noon-day sun; the red clouds of evening arching low, kissing the blue lips of the sea, and above the serene, silent pathway to the stars.

“Let us believe his dying eyes read a mystic meaning only the parting soul can know; that he heard the waves of the ebbing tide of life breaking on the far-off shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the calm, sweet breath of heaven’s morning.”

Place behind these utterances the rich voice and magnetic manner of the “Plumed Knight” of the platform, and you can realize what oratory means.

If you will here pardon me for going from the sublime to the ridiculous, I will show you how a bit of a school boy rhetoric may win its way over solid argument.  In the country school I attended, there was a debating society.  Parents as well as their sons were admitted to the society and the public was invited to the debates.  On one occasion the question for debate was:  “Which is the more attractive, the works of nature or the works of art?”

There had been an appeal from a general debate and this time one speaker was chosen from each side.  My father was chosen to represent the negative and I the affirmative.  My father was a good speaker but so fond of facts he had no use for rhetoric.  I had the opening address of thirty minutes, my father had forty-five minutes and I had fifteen minutes to close the debate.