This is childish, of course.  A man may not infrequently be forced by circumstances to speak before an audience whose sentiments, opinions, prejudices, all place them in a position antagonistic to his own.  How shall he make them well-disposed, attentive, willing to be instructed?  The situation is not likely to surround a beginning speaker, but men in affairs, in business, in courts, must be prepared for such circumstances.  One of the most striking instances of a man who attempted to speak before an antagonistic group and yet by sheer power of his art and language ended by winning them to his own party is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Mark Antony speaks over his dead friend’s body.  Brutus allows it, but insists on speaking to the people first that he may explain why he and his fellow conspirators assassinated the great leader.  It was a mistake to allow a person from the opposite party to have the last word before the populace, but that is not the point just here.  Brutus is able to explain why a group of noble Romans felt that for the safety of the state and its inhabitants, they had to kill the rising favorite who would soon as King rule them all.  When he ceases speaking, the citizens approve the killing.  Mark Antony perceives that, so at the beginning of his speech he seems to agree with the people.  Caesar was his friend, yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man.  Thus the skilful orator makes the populace well-disposed towards him, then attentive.

Having secured those things he proceeds slowly and unobtrusively to instruct them.  It takes only a few lines until he has made them believe all he wants them to; before the end of his oration he has them crying out upon the murderers of their beloved Caesar, for whose lives they now thirst.  Yet only ten minutes earlier they were loudly acclaiming them as deliverers of their country.  The entire scene should be analyzed carefully by the student.  It is the second scene of the third act of the play.

In actual life a man would hardly have to go so far as seemingly to agree with such opposite sentiments as expressed in this situation from a stage tragedy.  It is general knowledge that during the early years of the American Civil War England sympathized with the southern states, mainly because the effective blockade maintained by the North prevented raw cotton from reaching the British mills.  Henry Ward Beecher attempted to present the union cause to the English in a series of addresses throughout the country.  When he appeared upon the platform in Liverpool the audience broke out into a riot of noise which effectively drowned all his words for minutes.  The speaker waited until he could get in a phrase.  Finally he was allowed to deliver a few sentences.  By his patience, his appeal to their English sense of fair play, and to a large degree by his tolerant sense of humor, he won their attention.  His material, his power as a speaker did all the rest.