It was as simple as it was sincere.  And it was as conversational as it was quiet.  Before he had finished, his audience had gathered into itself every pedestrian who passed during his discourse—­business man, professional man, working man, or what not.

The fight above described suggests the key to the matter as well as the manner of speaking.  The American audience properly demands, above everything else, that the speaker get to the point.  Our lives are so rapid; the telephone, telegraph, and all the instantaneous agencies of our neurotically swift civilization have made us so quick in seeing through propositions; a hundred years of universal education have produced a mentality so electric in its rapidity, that effective oratory has been revolutionized within a decade.

Burke would not be tolerated now.  It is doubtful, even, if Webster would.  The public has already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll’s redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music.  The effective speech to-day is a statement of conclusions.

The listeners, with a celerity inconceivable, sum up the argument on either side of the proposition you announce, and accept or reject it by a process of unconscious mental cerebration.

The most successful speech of to-day would be one of Emerson’s essays rearranged in logical order—­if such a thing were possible.  Therefore, in matter, the statement is the form of address now most effective.  Recall the opinion of Senator McDonald—­the greatest natural lawyer I ever knew—­that the best argument in a case always is the statement of the case.

In form, the sentences should be short; in language, the words should be as largely as possible Anglo-Saxon.  These are the words of the people you address, therefore they are most influential with them.  Also, therefore, your best method of getting Anglo-Saxon is to mingle with and talk with the common people.  The next best method is to read the Bible, the King James translation of which is undoubtedly the purest fountain of English that flows in all the world of our literature.

What nonsense the repeated statement that public speaking has had its day, that the newspaper has taken its place, and all the rest of that kind of talk.  Public speaking will never decline until men cease to have ears to hear.  How hard it is to read a speech; how delightful to listen!

Speaking is Nature’s choicest method of instruction.

It begins with mother to child; it continues with teacher to pupil; it continues still in lecturer or professor to his student (for the universities are all going back to the old oral method of instruction); and it still continues in all the forms of effective human communication.

The newspapers are a marvelous influence, but they are not everything, and they do not supply everything.  For example, it is commonly supposed that they, absolutely and exclusively, mold and control public opinion.  But they do not.  When all has been said, the most powerful public opinion, after all, is that from-mouth-to-mouth public opinion—­that living, moving opinion—­which spreads from neighbor to neighbor, and has fused into it the vitality of the personality of nearly every man—­yes, and woman; don’t forget that—­in the whole community.