Good speakers, then, are made, not born.  Training counts for as much as natural ability.  In fact if a person considers carefully the careers of men whose ability to speak has impressed the world by its preeminence he will incline to the conclusion that the majority of them were not to any signal extent born speakers at all.  In nearly all cases of great speakers who have left records of their own progress in this powerful art their testimony is that without the effort to improve, without the unceasing practice they would have always remained no more marked for this so-called gift than all others.

Overcoming Drawbacks.  According to the regularly repeated tradition the great Greek orator, Demosthenes, overcame impediments that would have daunted any ordinary man.  His voice was weak.  He lisped, and his manner was awkward.  With pebbles in his mouth he tried his lungs against the noise of the dashing waves.  This strengthened his voice and gave him presence of mind in case of tumult among his listeners.  He declaimed as he ran uphill.  Whether these traditions be true or not, their basis must be that it was only by rigorous training that he did become a tolerable speaker.  The significant point, however, is that with apparent handicaps he did develop his ability until he became great.

Charles James Fox began his parliamentary career by being decidedly awkward and filling his speeches with needless repetitions, yet he became renowned as one of Great Britain’s most brilliant speakers and statesmen.

Henry Clay clearly describes his own exercises in self-training when he was quite a grown man.

“I owe my success in life to one single fact, namely, at the age of twenty-seven I commenced, and continued for years, the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical or scientific book.  These offhand efforts were made sometimes in a corn field, at others in the forests, and not infrequently in some distant barn with the horse and ox for my auditors.  It is to this early practice in the art of all arts that I am indebted to the primary and leading impulses that stimulated me forward, and shaped and molded my entire destiny.”

Abraham Lincoln never let pass any opportunity to try to make a speech.  His early employers, when called upon after his fame was won to describe his habits as a young man, admitted that they might have been disposed to consider him an idle fellow.  They explained that he was not only idle himself but the cause of idleness in others.  Unless closely watched, he was likely to mount a stump and, to the intense delight of his fellow farm hands, deliver a side-splitting imitation of some itinerant preacher or a stirring political harangue.

The American whose reputation for speech is the greatest won it more through training than by natural gift.