How to Master the Spoken Word / Designed as a Self-Instructor for all who would Excel in the Art of Public Speaking

by Edwin Gordon Lawrence

—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