and with however small a band of supporters.  If you are right, the time will come when that small band will swell into a multitude; you will at least lay the foundations of something memorable, and you may, like Mr. Garrison—­tho you ought not to need or expect so great a reward—­be spared to see that work completed which, when you began it, you only hoped it might be given to you to help forward a few stages on its way.

“The other lesson which it appears to me important to enforce, amongst the many that may be drawn from our friend’s life, is this:  If you aim at something noble and succeed in it, you will generally find that you have succeeded not in that alone.  A hundred other good and noble things which you never dreamed of will have been accomplished by the way, and the more certainly, the sharper and more agonizing has been the struggle which preceded the victory.  The heart and mind of a nation are never stirred from their foundations without manifold good fruits.  In the case of the great American contest these fruits have been already great, and are daily becoming greater.  The prejudices which beset every form of society—­and of which there was a plentiful crop in America—­are rapidly melting away.  The chains of prescription have been broken; it is not only the slave who has been freed—­the mind of America has been emancipated.  The whole intellect of the country has been set thinking about the fundamental questions of society and government; and the new problems which have to be solved and the new difficulties which have to be encountered are calling forth new activity of thought, and that great nation is saved probably for a long time to come, from the most formidable danger of a completely settled state of society and opinion—­intellectual and moral stagnation.  This, then, is an additional item of the debt which America and mankind owe to Mr. Garrison and his noble associates; and it is well calculated to deepen our sense of the truth which his whole career most strikingly illustrates—­that tho our best directed efforts may often seem wasted and lost, nothing coming of them that can be pointed to and distinctly identified as a definite gain to humanity, tho this may happen ninety-nine times in every hundred, the hundredth time the result may be so great and dazzling that we had never dared to hope for it, and should have regarded him who had predicted it to us as sanguine beyond the bounds of mental sanity.  So has it been with Mr. Garrison.”

It will be beneficial for your all-round development in speaking to choose for earnest study several speeches of widely different character.  As you compare one speech with another, you will more readily see why each subject requires a different form of treatment, and also learn to judge how the speaker has availed himself of the possibilities afforded him.

Judge Story

The speech which follows is a fine example of elevated and impassioned oratory.  Judge Story here lauds the American Republic, and employs to advantage the rhetorical figures of exclamation and interrogation.