Читать книгу THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEAKING - J. BERG ESENWEIN DALE CARNAGEY - Страница 16

1. Define tempo.

2. What words come from the same root?

3. What is meant by a change of tempo?

4. What effects are gained by it?

5. Name three methods of destroying monotony and gaining force in

speaking.

6. Note the changes of tempo in a conversation or speech that you hear.

Were they well made? Why? Illustrate.

7. Read selections on pages 34, 35, 36, 37, and 38, paying careful

attention to change of tempo.

8. As a rule, excitement, joy, or intense anger take a fast tempo, while

sorrow, and sentiments of great dignity or solemnity tend to a slow

tempo. Try to deliver Lincoln's Gettysburg speech (page 50), in a fast

tempo, or Patrick Henry's speech (page 110), in a slow tempo, and note

how ridiculous the effect will be.

Practise the following selections, noting carefully where the tempo may

be changed to advantage. Experiment, making numerous changes. Which one

do you like best?

_DEDICATION OF GETTYSBURG CEMETERY_

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon

this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated

to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are

engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation--or

any nation so conceived and so dedicated--can long endure.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to

dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who

have given their lives that that nation might live. It is

altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot

consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living

and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our

power to add or to detract. The world will very little note nor

long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what

they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the

unfinished work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is

rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining

before us: that from these honored dead we take increased

devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full

measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead

shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God,

have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people,

by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

_A PLEA FOR CUBA_

[This deliberative oration was delivered by Senator Thurston in

the United States Senate on March 24, 1898. It is recorded in

full in the _Congressional Record_ of that date. Mrs. Thurston

died in Cuba. As a dying request she urged her husband, who was

investigating affairs in the island, to do his utmost to induce

the United States to intervene--hence this oration.]

Mr. President, I am here by command of silent lips to speak once

and for all upon the Cuban situation. I shall endeavor to be

honest, conservative, and just. I have no purpose to stir the

public passion to any action not necessary and imperative to

meet the duties and necessities of American responsibility,

Christian humanity, and national honor. I would shirk this task

if I could, but I dare not. I cannot satisfy my conscience

except by speaking, and speaking now.

I went to Cuba firmly believing that the condition of affairs

there had been greatly exaggerated by the press, and my own

efforts were directed in the first instance to the attempted

exposure of these supposed exaggerations. There has undoubtedly

been much sensationalism in the journalism of the time, but as

to the condition of affairs in Cuba, there has been no

exaggeration, because exaggeration has been impossible.

Under the inhuman policy of Weyler not less than four hundred

thousand self-supporting, simple, peaceable, defenseless country

people were driven from their homes in the agricultural portions

of the Spanish provinces to the cities, and imprisoned upon the

barren waste outside the residence portions of these cities and

within the lines of intrenchment established a little way

beyond. Their humble homes were burned, their fields laid waste,

their implements of husbandry destroyed, their live stock and

food supplies for the most part confiscated. Most of the people

were old men, women, and children. They were thus placed in

hopeless imprisonment, without shelter or food. There was no

work for them in the cities to which they were driven. They were

left with nothing to depend upon except the scanty charity of

the inhabitants of the cities and with slow starvation their

inevitable fate....

The pictures in the American newspapers of the starving

reconcentrados are true. They can all be duplicated by the

thousands. I never before saw, and please God I may never again

see, so deplorable a sight as the reconcentrados in the suburbs

of Matanzas. I can never forget to my dying day the hopeless

anguish in their despairing eyes. Huddled about their little

bark huts, they raised no voice of appeal to us for alms as we

went among them....

Men, women, and children stand silent, famishing with hunger.

Their only appeal comes from their sad eyes, through which one

looks as through an open window into their agonizing souls.

The government of Spain has not appropriated and will not

appropriate one dollar to save these people. They are now being

attended and nursed and administered to by the charity of the

United States. Think of the spectacle! We are feeding these

citizens of Spain; we are nursing their sick; we are saving such

as can be saved, and yet there are those who still say it is

right for us to send food, but we must keep hands off. I say

that the time has come when muskets ought to go with the food.

We asked the governor if he knew of any relief for these people

except through the charity of the United States. He did not. We

asked him, "When do you think the time will come that these

people can be placed in a position of self-support?" He replied

to us, with deep feeling, "Only the good God or the great

government of the United States will answer that question." I

hope and believe that the good God by the great government of

the United States will answer that question.

I shall refer to these horrible things no further. They are

there. God pity me, I have seen them; they will remain in my

mind forever--and this is almost the twentieth century. Christ

died nineteen hundred years ago, and Spain is a Christian

nation. She has set up more crosses in more lands, beneath more

skies, and under them has butchered more people than all the

other nations of the earth combined. Europe may tolerate her

existence as long as the people of the Old World wish. God grant

that before another Christmas morning the last vestige of

Spanish tyranny and oppression will have vanished from the

Western Hemisphere!...

The time for action has come. No greater reason for it can exist

to-morrow than exists to-day. Every hour's delay only adds

another chapter to the awful story of misery and death. Only one

power can intervene--the United States of America. Ours is the

one great nation in the world, the mother of American republics.

She holds a position of trust and responsibility toward the

peoples and affairs of the whole Western Hemisphere. It was her

glorious example which inspired the patriots of Cuba to raise

the flag of liberty in her eternal hills. We cannot refuse to

accept this responsibility which the God of the universe has

placed upon us as the one great power in the New World. We must

act! What shall our action be?

Against the intervention of the United States in this holy cause

there is but one voice of dissent; that voice is the voice of

the money-changers. They fear war! Not because of any Christian

or ennobling sentiment against war and in favor of peace, but

because they fear that a declaration of war, or the intervention

which might result in war, would have a depressing effect upon

the stock market. Let them go. They do not represent American

sentiment; they do not represent American patriotism. Let them

take their chances as they can. Their weal or woe is of but

little importance to the liberty-loving people of the United

States. They will not do the fighting; their blood will not

flow; they will keep on dealing in options on human life. Let

the men whose loyalty is to the dollar stand aside while the men

whose loyalty is to the flag come to the front.

Mr. President, there is only one action possible, if any is

taken; that is, intervention for the independence of the island.

But we cannot intervene and save Cuba without the exercise of

force, and force means war; war means blood. The lowly Nazarene

on the shores of Galilee preached the divine doctrine of love,

"Peace on earth, good will toward men." Not peace on earth at

the expense of liberty and humanity. Not good will toward men

who despoil, enslave, degrade, and starve to death their

fellow-men. I believe in the doctrine of Christ. I believe in

the doctrine of peace; but, Mr. President, men must have liberty

before there can come abiding peace.

Intervention means force. Force means war. War means blood. But

it will be God's force. When has a battle for humanity and

liberty ever been won except by force? What barricade of wrong,

injustice, and oppression has ever been carried except by force?

Force compelled the signature of unwilling royalty to the great

Magna Charta; force put life into the Declaration of

Independence and made effective the Emancipation Proclamation;

force beat with naked hands upon the iron gateway of the Bastile

and made reprisal in one awful hour for centuries of kingly

crime; force waved the flag of revolution over Bunker Hill and

marked the snows of Valley Forge with blood-stained feet; force

held the broken line of Shiloh, climbed the flame-swept hill at

Chattanooga, and stormed the clouds on Lookout Heights; force

marched with Sherman to the sea, rode with Sheridan in the

valley of the Shenandoah, and gave Grant victory at Appomattox;

force saved the Union, kept the stars in the flag, made

"niggers" men. The time for God's force has come again. Let the

impassioned lips of American patriots once more take up the

song:--

"In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea.

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

While God is marching on."

Others may hesitate, others may procrastinate, others may plead

for further diplomatic negotiation, which means delay; but for

me, I am ready to act now, and for my action I am ready to

answer to my conscience, my country, and my God.

--JAMES MELLEN THURSTON.