17.  A public spirit so lofty is not confined to other lands.  You
    are conscious of its stirrings in your soul.  It calls you to
    courageous service, and I am here to bid you obey the call. 
    Such patriotism may be yours.  Let it be your parting vow that
    it shall be yours.  Bolingbroke described a patriot king in
    England; I can imagine a patriot president in America.  I can
    see him indeed the choice of a party, and called to
    administer the government when sectional jealousy is fiercest
    and party passion most inflamed.  I can imagine him seeing
    clearly what justice and humanity, the national law and the
    national welfare require him to do, and resolved to do it.  I
    can imagine him patiently enduring not only the mad cry of
    party hate, the taunt of “recreant” and “traitor,” of
    “renegade” and “coward,” but what is harder to bear, the
    amazement, the doubt, the grief, the denunciation, of those
    as sincerely devoted as he to the common welfare.  I can
    imagine him pushing firmly on, trusting the heart, the
    intelligence, the conscience of his countrymen, healing angry
    wounds, correcting misunderstandings, planting justice on
    surer foundations, and, whether his party rise or fall,
    lifting his country heavenward to a more perfect union,
    prosperity, and peace.  This is the spirit of a patriotism
    that girds the commonwealth with the resistless splendor of
    the moral law—­the invulnerable panoply of states, the
    celestial secret of a great nation and a happy people.

    GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS:  The Public Duty of Educated
    Men, 1877

CHAPTER VI.

GETTING MATERIAL

The Material of Speeches.  So far this book has dealt almost entirely with the manner of speaking.  Now it comes to the relatively more important consideration of the material of speech.  Necessary as it is that a speaker shall know how to speak, it is much more valuable that he shall know what to speak.  We frequently hear it said of a speaker, “It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it,” indicating clearly that the striking aspect of the delivery was his manner; but even when this remark is explained it develops frequently that there was some value in the material, as well as some charm or surprise or novelty in the method of expression.  In the last and closest analysis a speech is valuable for what it conveys to its hearers’ minds, what it induces them to do, not what temporary effects of charm and entertainment it affords.

Persons of keen minds and cultivated understandings have come away from gatherings addressed by men famous as good speech-makers and confessed to something like the following:  “I was held spellbound all the time he was talking, but for the life of me, I can’t tell you one thing he said or one idea he impressed upon me.”  A student should judge speeches he hears with such things in mind, so that he can hold certain ones up as models, and discard others as “horrible examples.”