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Secretary Stanton, while in charge of the War Department during our sectional conflict, had a curt way of doing things and a desire to attain his ends by the shortest possible roads. Hence his fondness for monosyllables. Ex-Governor Letcher, of Virginia, was taken prisoner during the war and confined in prison in Washington. After the lapse of two months and a half, he managed to get released on parole, and this was Stanton’s characteristic order and the whole of it,—

Washington, D. C., July 25, 1863.—John Letcher is hereby paroled. He will go home by the same road he came here, and will stay there and keep quiet.

Edwin M. Stanton.

Twenty-one words in all, besides the proper names and date, and eighteen of them monosyllables.

During the life of John Bright the Pall Mall Gazette said, “An admirer of Mr. Bright writes to a Manchester paper that he discovered the secret of the power this great speaker possessed of riveting the attention of his audience. This he believes to lie in the fact that he used monosyllables very largely. The grand passage in Mr. Bright’s speech on the Burials bill describing a Quaker funeral begins, ‘I will take the case of my own sect,’ and on counting the words of that remarkable oration it will be found that out of one hundred and ninety words one hundred and forty-nine, more than seventy-five per cent., were monosyllables. On this it is urged that those in charge of youth should teach them the use of monosyllables. An American journal lately mentioned a school where such pains had been taken to instruct the boys in the art of public speaking that if they had learned nothing else they had acquired the greatest contempt for all the devices of stump oratory. The prescribed course of study leaves much to the imagination, but doubtless includes the translation into monosyllables of the ponderous verbiage which passes current in most political assemblies as genuine eloquence. It would, however, be cruel to insist on the introduction of such teaching into any of the ‘standards.’ Many are obliged to speak who have less to say than Mr. Bright, and to them the sesquipedalia verba are indispensable.”