Public Speaking: Principles and Practice

by Irvah Lester Winter

There are some things more important than the highest culture. The West is the Almighty's reserve ground, and as the world is filling up, He is turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres, and is sending there the rain as well as the sunshine. A high and glorious destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the other side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must find waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy people:—

"Who love the land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a King upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his Majesty."

In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee reėnforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater. Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States, and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in the future, even more than in the past, the heads of the New England households weary not in the good work.

In these days of "booms" and New Souths and Great Wests, when everybody up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to apologize for it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a sort of tendency to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much considered; and New England being small in area and most of her distinguished people being dead, she is just now somewhat under an eclipse. But in her past she has undying fame. You of New England and her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness. The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that, with each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet—

"Not by Eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But Westward, look, the land is bright!"

WOMAN

From "Modern Eloquence," Vol. Ill, Geo. L. Shuman and Company, Chicago, publishers.

BY THEODORE TILTON

You must not forget, Mr. President, in eulogizing the early men of New England, who are your clients to-night, that it was only through the help of the early women of New England, who are mine, that your boasted heroes could ever have earned their title of the Pilgrim Fathers. A health, therefore, to the women in the cabin of the Mayflower! A cluster of Mayflowers themselves, transplanted from summer in the old world to winter in the new! Counting over those matrons and maidens, they numbered, all told, just eighteen. Their names are now written among the heroines of history! For as over the ashes of Cornelia stood the epitaph "The Mother of the Gracchi," so over these women of the Pilgrimage we write as proudly "The Mothers of the Republic." There was good Mistress Bradford, whose feet were not allowed of God to kiss Plymouth Rock, and who, like Moses, came only near enough to see but not to enter the Promised Land. She was washed overboard from the deck—and to this day the sea is her grave and Cape Cod her monument! There was Mistress Carver, wife of the first governor, who, when her husband fell under the stroke of sudden death, followed him first with heroic grief to the grave, and then, a fortnight after, followed him with heroic joy up into Heaven! There was Mistress White—the mother of the first child born to the New England Pilgrims on this continent. And it was a good omen, sir, that this historic babe was brought into the world on board the Mayflower between the time of the casting of her anchor and the landing of her passengers—a kind of amphibious prophecy that the newborn nation was to have a birthright inheritance over the sea and over the land. There also was Rose Standish, whose name is a perpetual June fragrance, to mellow and sweeten those December winds.

Then, after the first vessel with these women, there came other women— loving hearts drawn from the olden land by those silken threads which afterwards harden into golden chains. For instance, Governor Bradford, a lonesome widower, went down to the seabeach, and, facing the waves, tossed a love letter over the wide ocean into the lap of Alice Southworth in old England, who caught it up, and read it, and said, "Yes, I will go." And she went! And it is said that the governor, at his second wedding, married his first love! Which, according to the New Theology, furnishes the providential reason why the first Mrs. Bradford fell overboard!