Answer. If Christ had written a decoy letter to the woman to whom he said: "Go and sin no more," and if he had disguised himself and visited her house and had then lodged a complaint against her before the police and testified against her, taking one of his disciples with him, I do not think he would have added to his reputation.
—The News, Indianapolis, Indiana, February 18, 1892.
PERSONAL MAGNETISM AND THE SUNDAY QUESTION.
[Colonel Ingersoll was a picturesque figure as he sat in his
room at the Gibson House yesterday, while the balmy May
breeze blew through the open windows, fluttered the lace
curtains and tossed the great Infidel's snowy hair to and
fro. The Colonel had come in from New York during the
morning and the keen white sunlight of a lovely May day
filled his heart with gladness. After breakfast, the man
who preaches the doctrine of the Golden Rule and the Gospel
of Humanity and the while chaffs the gentlemen of the
clerical profession, was in a fine humor. He was busy with
cards and callers, but not too busy to admire the vase full
of freshly-picked spring flowers that stood on the mantel,
and wrestled with clouds of cigar smoke, to see which
fragrance should dominate the atmosphere.
To a reporter of The Commercial Gazette, the Colonel spoke
freely and interestingly upon a variety of subjects, from
personal magnetism in politics to mob rule in Tennessee. He
had been interested in Colonel Weir's statement about the
lack of gas in Exposition Hall, at the 1876 convention, and
when asked if he believed there was any truth in the stories
that the gas supply had been manipulated so as to prevent
the taking of a ballot after he had placed James G. Blaine
in nomination, he replied: ]
All I can say is, that I heard such a story the day after the convention, but I do not know whether or not it is true. I have always believed, that if a vote had been taken that evening, Blaine would have been nominated, possibly not as the effect of my speech, but the night gave time for trafficking, and that is always dangerous in a convention. I believed then that Blaine ought to have been nominated, and that it would have been a very wise thing for the party to have done. That he was not the candidate was due partly to accident and partly to political traffic, but that is one of the bygones, and I believe there is an old saying to the effect that even the gods have no mastery over the past.
Question. Do you think that eloquence is potent in a convention to set aside the practical work of politics and politicians?
Answer. I think that all the eloquence in the world cannot affect a trade if the parties to the contract stand firm, and when people have made a political trade they are not the kind of people to be affected by eloquence. The practical work of the world has very little to do with eloquence. There are a great many thousand stone masons to one sculptor, and houses and walls are not constructed by sculptors, but by masons. The daily wants of the world are supplied by the practical workers, by men of talent, not by men of genius, although in the world of invention, genius has done more, it may be, than the workers themselves. I fancy the machinery now in the world does the work of many hundreds of millions; that there is machinery enough now to do several times the work that could be done by all the men, women and children of the earth. The genius who invented the reaper did more work and will do more work in the harvest field than thousands of millions of men, and the same may be said of the great engines that drive the locomotives and the ships. All these marvelous machines were made by men of genius, but they are not the men who in fact do the work.
[This led the Colonel to pay a brilliant tribute to the great orators of ancient and modern times, the peer of all of them being Cicero. He dissected and defined oratory and eloquence, and explained with picturesque figures, wherein the difference between them lay. As he mentioned the magnetism of public speakers, he was asked as to his opinion of the value of personal magnetism in political life.]