ness and tact must seize upon the event which threatens to break up the meeting, and turn a defeat into victory. His calmness must quiet a panic. His firmness must unnerve a mob. To be master of any situation, a man must first be master of himself.

Yet no man should be discouraged because he feels himself deficient in this respect. That confidence which puts a speaker completely at his ease is not to be expected at first, and to many an able speaker it has come only after persistent struggles. The greatest self-assurance often has the least justification. "Every great orator from Demosthenes to Burke," Gladstone once said, "has suffered from nervousness on the eve of an important speech, and although I cannot claim to share their gift of golden speech, I can claim more than a fair share of their defect of nerves."

6. Humor. To have the audience in good humor is to have the case half won. A sense of humor may enable a speaker to use to his advantage what would otherwise be his downfall. Sometimes he can do no better than to relieve the strain of an address by an illustration or anecdote which is merely amusing. If properly used, it serves the purpose of the jester's scene in a tragedy; by contrast, it heightens the effect of the serious parts. A single touch of humor may be the saving grace of a speech. A story may give point and vividness to an argument; it may even render argument unnecessary. But it must be "pat "; it must not be open to wrong interpretation; it must be brief; and it must be subservient to the main purpose. Such a story as illustrated in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washingtonaids persuasion. Let the speaker take care, however, that the audience laugh with him, rather than at him, and that he leave uppermost in their minds, not the humor, but the serious central theme of his address.

7. Sympathy. The basis of the art of persuasion is a knowledge of human nature as sympathetic as it is wide. The

speaker who knows men and women tells instinctively what emotions he may appeal to in a given audience, what ideas he must leave unspoken, and when another word will spoil all. Such a speaker will never " talk down" to his audience; he will not assume the rôle of the dictator; he will not strike an attitude as if to set the world aright; and he will not approach his audience as though he expected to browbeat them into convictions. He knows that the people are willing to be led, never willing to be driven. So he merely takes them into his confidence, and talks to them as though he thought they knew as much as he knows. Putting himself in their places, he selects those phases of the subject which are closest to their interests, as Beecher selected the industrial side of the slavery question in his speech before the workingmen of Liverpool. He does not blame his hearers for being unconvinced, but himself for failing to convince them.

The unpersuasive attitude toward opponents is illustrated in the following editorial. Both the words of the Defense Society and the words of the editor in reply are more likely to confirm than to overcome opposition:

"Unfortunately every move that is proposed for full preparedness still is opposed by a blatant crowd of pacifists, slackers, kickers, and traitors, who against good causes know how to fight very vigorously! The curse of our country to-day is its motley crew of bad citizens. Another curse is the astounding apathy of many good citizens. Against these ball-and-chain influences forever dragging on the leg of Progress, one must fight."

Who is it who thus knows out of his complete and divine wisdom just who are good citizens and who are bad? Why, the American Defense Society, of course. Yet, while it weeps over the motley crew who are in its eyes bad citizens because they refuse to agree with it that the way to preserve peace is to Prussianize the United States, it has not lost courage. No, indeed. "Our cause," it says, "is gaining ground no doubt about that!" and to consolidate the ground won, it asks a beggarly $30,000 for the coming year's work - $30,000, where last winter it was getting money by tens

of thousands of dollars. Eighty-five thousand dollars, one canvasser alone reported, found its way into the Defense Society's treasury. Plainly, it is enormously to the Society's credit that it still keeps its faith in us Americans when it is compelled to circularize the public for a paltry $30,000 with which to finance its campaign for conscription.1

The persuasive speaker, feeling with his hearers the difficulty of concentrating the mind on one subject for any length of time, aids them with variety in tone, in emphasis, in delivery, with the unexpected, with picturesque phrasing and apt illustrations, with touches of humor, and with avoidance of the commonplace. He watches his audience to discover whether they are following him; he feels intuitively when they do not understand him. A sympathetic speaker can discern a look of intelligence, even in the most stolid faces, which tells him that his ideas are not falling on barren ground. He watches especially those people whose attention lags, and he stops speaking before they become restless. In short, the persuasive speaker gets the point of view of "the other fellow," feels the state of mind and body of his every hearer, and adapts his address accordingly. This is persuasion.

8. Openness of mind. A willingness to know, a readiness to listen, a desire to be convinced, an attitude of candor, an honesty of the intellect,2- these characteristics of the developed mind are in themselves persuasive. That immorality of the intellect which withholds, distorts, minimizes, or refuses to acknowledge the truth is the shackel of the closed mind and a foe of persuasion. To welcome personally disagreeable truth is a test too severe for undeveloped minds, and even the educated man must love the truth above everything before he is sufficiently humble to pass the test smilingly. To such a man the whole truth is dear; he has faith in its capacity to stand alone without artificial supports. 9. Personal magnetism. The power of a speaker to draw 1 The Nation, November 23, 1916.

2 H. H. Horne, The Philosophy of Education, p. 228.

a whole audience into the circle of his influence, and to hold them as if entranced until his last word, is more easily felt than defined. This power may be called personal magnetism. It is best described in Emerson's Essay on Eloquence. It is the sum total of all the speaker's attributes, his physical,

mental, and moral characteristics, raised to their highest power, and working together for a definite object. In this respect, more than in any other, an orator is born, not made. Yet all that a man does to keep his body well formed and healthy, all that he does to make his thought keen and deep, and all that he does to make his conduct right as he sees the right, contribute to personal magnetism. A great and good speaker must first be a great and good man.

II. THE SUBJECT

The persuasive qualities of the speaker are but means toward the end of fastening the attention of the audience on the subject. Unless the subject is the deepest source of persuasion, there is no occasion for speaking. When an orator seems greater than his subject, people leave the hall talking about him. But the greatest praise they can give a speaker is to forget him and his rhetoric in earnest discussion of what he says. The difference between the oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes has been suggested by this remark: "When Cicero spoke, people said, 'How well he speaks!' When Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us go against Philip!'" One impressed himself on the audience, the other, his subject. There may be persuasion in a speaker's relation to his subject. After a heated discussion in one of the social settlement houses of a large city, on the question whether the United States should further restrict immigration, an Indian girl arose and quietly remarked, "So far as I can see, I am the only American present."

But more important than the relation of the speaker to his subject is the principle which abides in the subject. This

is the chief source of persuasion. The effective speaker probes beneath the surface and the transient situation which gave rise to the discussion, and reveals this underlying principle of universal application. On this principle he makes a final appeal, leading the audience to feel that the discussion has been worth while after all, and that the minor matters which make against his case are quite overshadowed by the importance of the vital principle. Thus a member of Congress, in defending himself against petty attacks, urged the people to sweep aside all personalities and local issues and decide a broader question, whether any lobbyist should be permitted to snap his whip over the head of any congressman and dictate how he should vote. The occasion which gave rise to Burke's Speech on Conciliation passed into history over a century ago, but the great principles on which the speech was founded still live. So with the master works of Demosthenes, of Cicero, of Erskine, of Wendell Phillips, of the orators of every age and race.

The speaker must study his subject and his audience to determine what are the highest motives to which he can effectively appeal. He must consider, on the one hand, the wealth of ethical incentives in his subject, and on the other hand, the capacity of his audience for responding to these ethical appeals. He must begin with the lower motives and work up to the higher, remembering that the larger the audience, the higher the motives to which they will respond. In urging students not to destroy college property, the Dean might suggest that, by respecting the wishes of others, they would get more respect for their own wishes; and that they will get freedom only in so far as they do not abuse freedom. These would be appeals to selfish motives. The Dean might then lift his appeal to higher planes by pointing out the loss in money to parents, the trouble to college authorities, and the disappointment to friends. He might then appeal to the loyalty of the students to their college, urging them not to