CHAPTER IV
COMPOSITION
Words make sentences, sentences form paragraphs, and paragraphs are developed into speeches. Words should be vital and instantly spring into position so that the thought may be quickly conveyed. They should be appropriate in that they may become the time, place, and circumstance in which they are used. They should not be employed for their own sake, but merely for the reason that they fit in properly with their fellows and adequately convey the speaker’s meaning. Words are important on account of their expressive power, and this is greatly influenced by their location; as,
Many times the attempt was made to stretch the royal authority far enough to justify military trials; but it never had more than temporary success.
—Jeremiah S. Black
In this sentence the word “temporary” is important for the reason that it qualifies the word “success,” and the ability properly to place words in a sentence so as to make them most effective in the performance of their duty is as important to the speaker as is the advantageous marshaling of an army to its general.
A sentence should contain one complete thought, and but one, and this thought should be presented from only one point of view. By remembering this, speakers will avoid confusing their listeners, as a sentence containing one thought presented from one point is most likely to be clear. The mind of the speaker grasps instantly such sentences, sees all around them, as it were, and as quickly presents them in the mind of the listener. Students of speech-making are strongly advised to observe this rule of unity in constructing their sentences.
Other essential qualities to the formation of good sentences are force and ease. Force is best represented in short sentences, and ease in long ones, although a sentence may, at times, lack ease because it is too long. A sentence that is so involved that its meaning is not instantly clear will lack in ease as well as in clearness, and is sure to be deficient in force. When a speaker wishes to employ force he should move from a weaker word to a stronger; as, Byron, Milton, and Shakespeare are representative English poets. When he wishes a sentence that is made up of a negative and a positive to be forceful he should place the negative first; as,
A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the object of the speaker is to be argumentative instead of assertive he should place the positive first; as,
Territory, like other property, can only be acquired for constitutional purposes, and cannot be acquired and governed for unconstitutional purposes.
—George F. Hoar
Sentences should be feeders, thus suggesting other sentences. They should connect one with the other at both ends like links forming a chain. The essential qualities of sentences are correctness, force, ease, unity, and clearness.
As there should be perfect ease in going from word to word in a sentence, so there should be like ease in going from sentence to sentence in a paragraph. In fact, a paragraph is much like a large sentence, the only real difference is that it is made of sentences whereas a sentence is composed of words. A paragraph, like a sentence, should be a unit, and one paragraph should grow out of another exactly as sentences should do, and thus will the many paragraphs form the speech in the same manner as do the words form the sentences and the sentences form the paragraphs.
The four forms of English composition are exposition, argumentation, narration, and description. Exposition teaches; argumentation convinces and persuades; narration tells; description shows. In oratory we have five classes: philosophic, demonstrative, forensic, deliberative, and social, and the four forms of composition may be employed in any of the five classes of oratory. Speakers, as a rule, use the narrative for the statement; exposition, argumentation, or description, for the body; and sometimes one form and sometimes another for the conclusion. A speaker might adopt the narrative form for stating his points, the argumentative for making them clear, and the descriptive for driving them home.
exposition
Exposition means the interpreting of a passage or a work, explaining and expounding its meaning, analyzing its parts, and laying bare to the reader or listener all that might be obscure. A splendid example of exposition is the following extract from The American Scholar, by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town—in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of polarity—these “fits of easy transmission and reflection,” as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness—he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those “far from fame,” who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandseled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
argumentation
Argumentation means the stating of points or facts, the logical presentation of them, and the drawing of conclusions from a consideration of the premises. Its objects are to convince and persuade the reader or listener. Argumentation that stops with conviction is incomplete—it must persuade as well as convince in order to be effective. A speaker accomplishes practically nothing if he convinces an audience but does not persuade it to do the thing he desires. Arguments may be direct or indirect. They are direct when aimed at a stated conclusion, and they are indirect when they are employed to disprove what is opposed to the speaker’s contention. The most effective form of argument is where the two forms, direct and indirect, are employed, thus not only demolishing one contention but clearly establishing the other. It is comparable to the contrast in oratory where the statement is made that a certain thing is not only not of a certain class but specifically belongs to another one. This is “clinching” the argument, and it leaves not a loophole for the escape of the opponent.
Here is an excellent piece of argumentative oratory, taken from an address of William H. Seward in the celebrated Freeman case.
“Thou shalt not kill,” is a commandment addressed, not to him alone, but to me, to you, to the Court, and to the whole community. There are no exceptions from that commandment, at least not in civil life, save those of self-defense, and capital punishment for crimes in the due and just administration of the law. There is not only a question, then, whether the prisoner has shed the blood of his fellow-man, but the question whether we shall unlawfully shed his blood. I should be guilty of murder if, in my present relation, I saw the executioner waiting for an insane man and failed to say, or failed to do in his behalf, all that my ability allowed. I think it has been proved of the prisoner at the bar, that during all this long and tedious trial, he has had no sleepless nights, and that even in the daytime, when he retires from the halls to his lonely cell, he sinks to rest like a wearied child, on the stone floor, and quietly slumbers till roused by the constable with his staff, to appear again before the jury. His counsel enjoy no such repose. Their thoughts by day and their dreams by night are filled with oppressive apprehension that, through their inability or neglect, he may be condemned.
I am arraigned before you for undue manifestations of zeal and excitement. My answer to all such charges shall be brief. When this cause shall have been committed to you, I shall be happy indeed if it shall appear that my only error has been that I have felt too much, thought too intensely, or acted too faithfully.
If my error would thus be criminal, how great would yours be if you should render an unjust verdict? Only four months have elapsed since an outraged people, distrustful of judicial redress, doomed the prisoner to immediate death. Some of you have confessed that you approved that lawless sentence. All men now rejoice that the prisoner was saved for this solemn trial. But this trial would be as criminal as that precipitate sentence, if, through any wilful fault or prejudice of yours, it should prove but a mockery of justice. If any prejudice of witnesses, or the imagination of counsel, or any ill-timed jest, shall, at any time, have diverted your attention; or if any prejudgment which you have brought into the jury box, or any cowardly fear of popular opinion shall have operated to cause you to deny to the prisoner that dispassionate consideration of his case which the laws of God and man exact of you, and if, owing to such an error, this wretched man fall from among the living, what will be your crime? You have violated the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” It is not the form or letter of the trial by jury that authorizes you to send your fellow-man to his dread account, but it is the spirit that sanctifies that glorious institution; and if, through pride, passion, timidity, weakness, or any cause, you deny the prisoner one iota of all the defense to which he is entitled by the law of the land, you yourselves, whatever his guilt may be, will have broken the commandment, “Thou shalt do no murder.”
narration
Narration is recounting the particulars of events, or enumerating facts; telling of occurrences or things in regular order. Specifically, it is that part of explanation that allows the subject in its relations to the movement of time. In simple words, it is a continuous telling.
The narrative form of composition is beautifully employed by Daniel Webster in his first Bunker Hill Monument address, the following being an extract from that admirable speech:
The society whose organ I am was formed for the purpose of rearing some honorable and durable monument to the memory of the early friends of American independence. They have thought that for this object no time could be more propitious than the present prosperous and peaceful period; that no place could claim preference over this memorable spot; and that no day could be more auspicious to the undertaking than the anniversary of the battle which was here fought. The foundation of that monument we have now laid. With solemnities suited to the occasion, with prayer to Almighty God for His blessing, and in the midst of this cloud of witnesses, we have begun the work. We trust it will be prosecuted, and that, springing from a broad foundation, rising high in massive solidity and unadorned grandeur, it may remain as long as Heaven permits the works of man to last, a fit emblem, both of the events in memory of which it is raised, and of the gratitude of those who have reared it.
description
Description is showing of things by means of language-pictures; telling the attributes that make up the whole. Word-pictures are created by means of explaining the individual parts of a theme or view as they affect the entire thing.
As a piece of word-picturing the following description of the breaking of day, by Edward Everett, is certainly magnificent:
Much as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating our conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present, even to the unaided sight, scenes of glory which words are too feeble to describe. I had occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston, and, for this purpose, rose at two o’clock in the morning. Every thing around was wrapped in darkness, and hushed in silence, broken only by what seemed, at that hour, the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, serene, mid-summer’s night; the sky was without a cloud; the winds were hushed. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen; and the stars shown with a spectral lustre but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day: the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in the east: Lyra sparkled near the zenith: Andromeda veiled her newly discovered glories from the naked eye, in the south: the steady Pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the north to their sovereign.
Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible. The intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the blue hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the Lord of Day, arrayed in glories too severe for gaze of man, began his course.
Examples for Practice
exposition
The Conspiracy to Murder. A conspiracy to kill and murder does not owe its criminality to the length of time it may occupy in its progress, from its first conception to its ultimate adoption—a conspiracy may be formed the very instant before the step is taken to put it into effect. If a number of people meet accidentally in the street, and conspire together to kill and murder at the moment, it is as essentially the crime of conspiracy as if it had been intended for a year before, and hatched from that year to the moment of its accomplishment.
—John P. Curran, Trial of John Costly for conspiracy
to murder, Dublin, Feb. 23, 1804
Circumstantial Evidence of Guilt. I need not pause to remind you how much caution, how much candor, and how much intelligence are requisite in appreciating circumstantial evidence in any case. That kind of evidence may clearly prove guilt. That many times, however, it has also shed innocent blood, and many times it has stained a fair name, I need not pause for a moment to illustrate or remind you. Instead of doing that, I think I shall be better occupied, under the direction of his honor, in reminding you of the two great rules by which circumstantial evidence is to be weighed, appreciated, and applied by the jury. Those rules, gentlemen, are these:
In the first place, that the jury shall be satisfied that they conduct, as a necessary result and conclusion, to the inference of guilt. It is a rule that may be called a golden rule in the examination and application of this kind of evidence which we call circumstantial, that should it so turn out that every fact and circumstance alleged and proved to exist is consistent, on the one hand with the hypothesis of guilt and on the other hand consistent, reasonably and fairly, with the hypothesis of innocence, then those circumstances prove nothing at all. Unless they go so far as to establish as a necessary conclusion this guilt which they are offered with a view to establish, they are utterly worthless and ineffectual for the investigation of truth. I had the honor to read to the court this morning, and possibly in your hearing, an authority in which that familiar and elementary doctrine was laid down, a doctrine every day applied, everywhere recognized as primary in the appreciation of this kind of evidence. It is not enough that the circumstances relied upon are plainly and certainly proved. It is not enough to show that they are consistent with the hypothesis of guilt. They must also render the hypothesis of innocence inadmissible and impossible, unreasonable and absurd, or they have proved nothing at all.
—Rufus Choate, in the Dalton divorce case
Stare Decisis. The people, in forming the organic law of the government of this state, very wisely foresaw that, in its action and progress, questions of interpretation of the settlement of legal principles, and of their application, would frequently arise; and thence the necessity of constituting some tribunal with general appellate and supervisory powers, whose decisions should be final and conclusively settle and declare the law. This was supposed to have been accomplished in the organization of this court. Heretofore this court, under the Constitution, has been looked to by the people as the tribunal of the last resort in the state; and it has hitherto been supposed that when this court has decided a case upon its merits such decision not only determined the right of the parties litigant in that particular case, but that it also settled the principles involved in it as permanent rules of law, universally applicable in all future cases embracing similar facts, and involving the same or analogous principles. These decisions thus became at once public law, measures of private right, and landmarks of property. They determined the right of persons and of things. Parties entered into contracts with each other with reference to them, as to the declared and established law; law equally binding upon the courts and the people. But the doctrine recently put forth would at once overturn this whole body of law founded upon the adjudications of this court, built up as it has been by the long continued and arduous labors, grown venerable with years, and interwoven as it has become with the interests, and habits, and the opinions of the people. Under this new doctrine all would again be unsettled—nothing established. Like the ever returning but never ending labors of the fabled Sisyphus, this court, in disregard to the maxim of “stare decisis,” would, in each recurring case, have to enter upon its examination and decision as if all were new, without any aid from the experience of the past, or the benefit of any established principle or settled law. Each case with decision being thus limited as law to itself alone would in turn pass away and be forgotten, leaving behind it no record of principle established, or light to guide, or rule to govern the future.
—Luther Bradish. Opinion given as Presiding Judge
of Court of Errors, in Hanford v. Archer,
Dec., 1842, at Albany, N. Y.
Argumentation
The Obligation of Contract. We contend that the obligation of a contract—that is, the duty of performing it—is not created by the law of the particular place where it is made, and dependent on that law for its existence; but that it may subsist, and does subsist, without the law, and independent of it. The obligation is in the contract itself, in the assent of the parties, and in the sanction of universal law. This is the doctrine of Grotius, Vattel, Burlamaqui, Pothier, and Rutherford. The contract, doubtless, is necessarily to be enforced by the municipal law of the place where performance is demanded. The municipal law acts on the contract after it is made, to compel its execution, or give damages for its violation. But this is a very different thing from the same law being the original or fountain of the contract.
Let us illustrate this matter by an example. Two persons contract together in New York for the delivery, by one to the other, of a domestic animal, a utensil of husbandry, or a weapon of war. This is a lawful contract, and, while the parties remain in New York it is to be enforced by the laws of that state. But, if they remove with the article to Pennsylvania or Maryland, there a new law comes to act upon the contract, and to apply other remedies if it be broken. Thus far the remedies are furnished by the laws of society. But suppose the same parties to go together to a savage wilderness, or a desert island beyond the reach of the laws of any society. The obligation of the contract still subsists, and is as perfect as ever, and is now to be enforced by another law, that is the law of nature; and the party to whom the promise was made has a right to take by force the animal, the utensil, or the weapon that was promised him. The right is as perfect here as it was in Pennsylvania, or even in New York.
—Daniel Webster, in Ogden v. Saunders
Parent and Child. The next greatest tie is that of parent and child. If in God’s providence a man has not only watched over the cradle of his child, but over the grave of his offspring, and has witnessed earth committed to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, he knows that the love of a parent for his child is stronger than death. The bitter lamentation, “Would to God I had died for thee,” has been wrung from many a parent’s heart. But when the adulterer’s shadow comes between the parent and child, it casts over both a gloom darker than the grave. What agony is equal to his who knows not whether the children gathered around his board are his own offspring or an adulterous brood, hatched in his bed. To the child it is still more disastrous. Nature designs that children shall have the care of both parents; the mother’s care is the chief blessing to her child—a mother’s honor its priceless inheritance. But when the adulterer enters a family, the child is deprived of the care of one parent, perhaps of both. When death, in God’s providence, strikes a mother from the family, the deepest grief that preys upon a husband’s heart is the loss of her nurture and example to his orphan child; and the sweetest conversation between parent and child is when they talk of the beloved mother who is gone. But how can a daughter hear that mother’s name without a blush? Death is merciful to the pitiless cruelty of him whose lust has stained the fair brow of innocent childhood by corrupting the heart of the mother, whose example must stain the daughter’s life.
—Edwin M. Stanton, in Sickles’ trial
Distrust of Witnesses. Are they witnesses to be trusted with report of evidence by words? Are they witnesses to remember words where everything may depend upon the exact expression, upon the order of the language, upon dropping an epithet here and inserting an epithet there, by which the guilt of adultery is confessed? Is this a body of witnesses that are to be trusted to report words, that are the issues of life, with certainty and accuracy? I submit that, on the outside of it, the whole case of confession to be listened to by this jury is a conclusive and rational distrust which would leave my client in no fear at all of the result. Here is a man that cannot be trusted to carry ten bushels of yellow, flat corn across the city for fear that he would steal half of it; who cannot be trusted to take a hat full of uncounted bills to New York. A man who has not honesty enough, or fairness enough, to weight the hind quarter of an ox—shall he be trusted to weigh out gold dust and dimes, and count the pulses of life? A man not honest enough, a combination not honest enough, to carry a letter without mutilating it into a falsehood, to prove words in which honesty, intelligence, and fairness may be entirely omitted. We come, then, to this examination of confession exactly in this state of the case: It is probability, amounting almost to a miracle, that a confession should be made under any circumstances at all. Confessions themselves are never to be acted upon by the jury unless they know, upon their oaths, that they have the very words spoken in the sense in which they came. They never can have that assurance if they have not a clear and undoubting confidence in the speaker that reports them. And their case opens, I say, with this: that a moral miracle is to be established on the testimony of confessions, by the evidence of witnesses, as a body, manifestly and apparently undeserving a moment’s confidence.
—Rufus Choate, in Dalton divorce case
narration
The History of Trial by Jury. I might begin with Tacitus, and show how the contest arose in the forest of Germany more than two thousand years ago; how the rough virtues and sound common sense of that people established the right of trial by jury, and thus started on a career which has made their posterity the foremost race that ever lived in all the tide of time. The Saxons carried it to England, and were ever ready to defend it with their blood. It was crushed out by the Danish invasion; and all that they suffered of tyranny and oppression during the period of their subjugation resulted from the want of trial by jury. If that had been conceded to them the reaction would not have taken place which drove back the Danes to their frozen homes in the north. But those ruffian sea-kings could not understand that, and the reaction came. Alfred, the greatest of revolutionary heroes and the wisest monarch that ever sat on a throne, made the first use of his power, after the Saxons restored it, to reëstablish their ancient laws. He had promised them that he would, and he was true to them because they had been true to him. But it was not easily done; the courts were opposed to it, for it limited their power—a kind of power that everybody covets—the power to punish without regard to law. He was obliged to hang forty-four judges in one year for refusing to give his subjects a trial by jury. When the historian says he hung them, it is not meant that he put them to death without a trial. He had them impeached before the grand council of the nation, the Witenagemot, the parliament of that time. During the subsequent period of Saxon domination no man on English soil was powerful enough to refuse a legal trial to the meanest peasant. If any minister or any king, in war or in peace, had dared to punish a freeman by tribunal of his own appointment, he would have roused the wrath of the whole population; all orders of society would have resisted it; lord and vassal, knight and squire, priest and penitent, bocman and socman, master and thrall, copyholder and villein, would have risen in one mass and burnt the offender to death in his castle, or followed him in his flight and torn him to atoms. It was again trampled down by the Norman conquerors; but the evils resulting from the want of it united all classes in the effort which compelled King John to restore it by the Great Charter. Everybody is familiar with the struggles which the English people, during many generations, made for their rights with the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts, and which ended finally in the revolution of 1688, when the liberties of England were placed upon an impregnable basis by the Bill of Rights. Many times the attempt was made to stretch the royal authority far enough to justify military trials; but it never had more than temporary success.
—Judge Jeremiah S. Black, in the Milligan
case, U. S. Supreme Court,
Washington, D. C., Dec., 1866
Testimony. I will go through the case fairly and discuss it fully. I will nothing extenuate, nor aught set down in malice. I will base my argument upon the testimony, not as I would have it, but as it is. I will speak not to the world, but to you, who can correct and hold me in judgment, if I fail to redeem the promises of fairness and candor which I make. Heaven can witness for me that I desire no fame at the expense of these unfortunate men. I will use no bitter words, I will affect no bitter loathing; I will assail neither man, woman, nor child, except under the urgent pressure of duty and necessity. I wish I could be spared the painful task of doing so at all.
—J. A. Van Dyke, in conspiracy case,
Detroit, Mich., Sept., 1851
description
Conscience. Lady Macbeth must needs walk by night in her sleep and rub her hands as if to wash them, and cry out: “Out, damned spot, out I say!” But all Neptune’s ocean will not wash the stain away; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the murderer’s hand. Conscience, the greatest gift of God, the child itself of God, working and acting obedient to the same law by which your system and mine, by their nature, will attempt to throw off disease, that which is imperfect and that which is poison, I say by that same law conscience seeks to throw off its load of guilt.
—State’s Attorney Frank M. Nye, in People v.
Hayward, Minneapolis, Minn., Dec., 1895
Consent Under Protest. Sir, the consent of Maine to part with her soil and her sovereignty was given with a bleeding heart; it was like the consent of him who bares his own right arm to the surgeon’s knife when advised that his life can only be preserved by its amputation; she consented as one consents to commit to kindred dust the children of his body; she consented as the red man consents to be driven from his happy hunting grounds, the graves of his fathers and the banks of the streams where he sported in childhood; she consented, as was said by another, as “the victim consents to execution because he walks and is not dragged to the scaffold which has been erected to receive him.”
—Daniel S. Dickinson, Speech in reply to
Webster on the Northwestern Boundary
question, U. S. Senate, April 9, 1846
Duties of Juries. Gentlemen of the jury, I have about concluded my duties in this case. Yours will follow. I ask from you nothing in the world but the intelligent judgment of twelve intelligent men on the evidence before you. I have only one little picture more to offer. It is Burns’s picture of the Scottish farmer in the seclusion of his family. His day’s work done, he draws his little family about him. He has laid aside his cap and has taken the old family Bible from its shelf. He calls Jane and James and the old mother and reads to them from God’s promises. Then all bow their heads in prayer. “In scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur lies.” Some of you here are wont to keep that sacred tryst. Into that tryst you would never admit this paper.
—General Black, in People v. Dunlap,
New York, Feb. 4, 1896