One of the orators best known to readers is Edmund Burke, whose speeches are studied as models of argumentative arrangement and style.  Yet in actual speech-making Burke was more or less a failure because of the unfortunate method of his delivery.  Many men markedly inferior in capacity to Burke overcame disadvantageous accidents, but he was frequently hurried and impetuous.  Though his tones were naturally sonorous, they were harsh; and he never divested his speech of a strong Irish accent.  Then, too, his gestures were clumsy.  These facts will explain to us who read and study leisurely these masterpieces why they failed of their purpose when presented by their gifted but ineffective author.

Pronunciation.  Enunciation depends to a great degree upon pronunciation.  The pronunciation of a word is no fixed and unchangeable thing.  Every district of a land may have its peculiar local sounds, every succeeding generation may vary the manner of accenting a word.  English people today pronounce schedule with a soft ch sound. Program has had its accent shifted from the last to the first syllable.  Many words have two regularly heard pronunciations—­neither, advertisement, Elizabethan, rations, oblique, route, quinine, etc.  Fashions come and go in pronunciation as in all other human interests.  Some sounds stamp themselves as carelessnesses or perversions at once and are never admitted into educated, cultured speech.  Others thrive and have their day, only to fade before some more widely accepted pronunciation.  The first rule in pronunciation is to consult a good dictionary.  This will help in most cases but not in all, for a dictionary merely records all accepted sounds; only partly can it point out the better of disputed sounds by placing it first.  Secondly, speech is a living, growing, changing thing.  Dictionaries drop behind the times surprisingly rapidly.  The regularly accepted sound may have come into general use after the dictionary was printed.  New activities, unusual phases of life may throw into general conversation thousands of unused, unheard words.  This was true of the recent Great War, when with little or no preparation thousands of military, industrial, naval, and aeronautical terms came into daily use.  Discussions still flutter mildly around cantonment and rations, and a score of others.

Next to authoritative books, the best models are to be secured from the speech of authorities in each branch to which the term specifically belongs.  Thus the military leaders have made the pronunciation of oblique with the long i the correct one for all military usages.  The accepted sound of cantonments was fixed by the men who built and controlled them.  As it is not always possible for the ordinary person to hear such authorities deliver such terms in discourse one can merely say that a familiarity with correct pronunciation can be secured only like liberty—­at the price of eternal vigilance.