When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school.  An overtall and powerful man, about forty years old, had become angry at a medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age.  As his passion increased his violence grew, until finally he was shouting his denunciations.  The little man stood quietly alert.

Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished.  He did neither.  His fists were raised quickly but intensely before him, and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches; but it did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot, sure enough.

He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again to be knocked down.  This continued for three or four times, for the giant was “game”; but finally he was “thrashed to a standstill,” as the expression has it.

It was a great lesson in life and a great lesson in speaking, which is only a phase of life.  The victor came to the point.  He did not dissipate his energies.  It is so in the manner of speaking.  The greatest contrast to the perfect method of Ingersoll which I ever beheld in a man of equal eminence was in the delivery of a lecture by Joseph Cook.

He came on the stage with ostentatious impressiveness.  He sat some time before he was introduced, seeming vast and overpowering—­a very Matterhorn of consequence.  After introduction he stood with one hand thrust in the breast of his tightly buttoned frock coat, and looked tremendously all over the audience for perhaps an entire minute.  Everybody was awed; he looked so great.  We all said to ourselves, “What a mighty man this is!”

And when that effect had been produced upon us, the first and great point of effectiveness had been destroyed:  the speaker had made us think about himself, his manner, his appearance, his personality.  All the evening we had to wade through that slough, trying to follow his thought.  And this reminds me of a saying of one of the most astute politicians and most capable public men of recent development: 

“The surest sign that a man is not great is that he strives to look great.”

I think that the best speech I ever heard for obedience to the rules of art was an address of about ten minutes by a young Salvation Army officer on the streets of Chicago.  I listened with amazement.  He was perhaps twenty-three years of age, with delicate, clear-cut features, sensitive mouth, and marvelously intelligent eyes.  I was just passing the group as he stepped into the circle that always surrounds these noisy but sincere enthusiasts.

He took off his cap, and in a low, perfectly natural, and very sweet voice, speaking exactly as though he were having a conversation with his most confidential friend, he began:  “You will admit, my friends, that human happiness is the problem of human life.”  And from this striking sentence he went on to another equally moving, showing, of course, that happiness could not be secured by traveling any of the usual roads, but only the straight and narrow path which the Master has marked out.