It is nothing more or less than an outrage, inflicted upon helpless people. I hope that the people of this county will be aroused to the enormity of this problem, and very soon put an end to this imposition.' "And the counterpart of the story in ' McClure's Maga zine' has happened here within a short time. Lewis Gerardin, a sailor, was released last April, after being de tained six months. Several months before, Frank lilaha, a saloon-keeper, who committed the crime of murder in the second degree, managed to get bail. While Gerardin was held he received pathetic letters from his wife and family, begging him to come home. They did not know why he was held, and he said that if they were to learn of his imprisonment they could not understand his innocence of crime. One day a letter was received from home, an nouncing that his favorite little son had died but a week before. The last words of the child called for his father. But Gerardin was not released until the prosecutor was ready to release him. "Such possibilities are a disgrace to any community that tolerates such a horrible law or such a feeble adminis tration of it, and such callousness to human suffering that it will not save these innocent victims from its outrageous injustice. When to this brutality are added the compara tive safety of the criminal and the vile jails and the vile inmates with whom young boys and girls and honest men and decent women are thrown for the crime of witnessing a crime, it convicts the civilization of the age with a com bination of stupidity and heartlessness that had better say nothing of the Czar of Russia or the ferocious Kurds. In its essential injustice and inhumanity it is not many re moves from the lynchings of the South."
Some Hints on the Art of Speaking. — Under this title the " London Law Journal " gives a very sen sible and entertaining article in a recent number, in which a contrast is drawn between English and Amer ican speakers, and several rules are laid down, which are better than most rules on this subject. The writer says : — "Indeed, it is not too much to say that neither in Eng land nor America are there any orators extant as the an cients understood an orator, or even as Pitt or Canning or Broughman understood the word. The Americans, how ever, without being orators, are good speakers, better, at least, in many points than Englishmen; less clumsy, less confused. They may not be superior in invention or in diction, but they possess, as their critic Mr. James Bryce ad mits, more fluency, more readiness, more self-possession. Any American can reel off a creditable, often an eloquent speech at a minute's notice, to the astonishment and envy of an Englishman. They have more quickness, too, in catching the temper and tendencies of an audience, more weight, animation, and grace in delivery, and crowning all this, more humor. Any rules for speaking, the result of American experience, are therefore well worthy of consider ation." Then follow the rules: (I) The speaker must be in earnest. (2) Never carry a scrap of paper before an audience. (3) Speak in a natural voice, in a conver
sational way; as the writer admits, the last is not fitted to the loftiest style of oratory. To these the writer adds one indispensable thing: "The voice is the soul of oratory." It must be permitted us to doubt that "Demosthenes wrote out Thucydides eight times to form his style." If he did he must have wasted his time, as much as one who should follow the cele brated advice to "spend one's days and nights with Addison." Americans possess the gift of gab, no doubt, but at present the loftiest type of oratory is lacking, possibly because the occasion for it is lacking. There are in this country plenty of excellent and en tertaining speakers, but the great platform speakers have gone out with the discontinuance of the lyceum lecture system. That wide theater of education was occupied by such real orators and charming speakers as Beecher, Phillips, Curtis, Chapin, Starr King, Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Richard Storrs, Gough, and others, but that system went out with the earnest de mands of the Civil War, and has never been rein stated. Oratory at the bar and in the pulpit has de clined because of the limitations of time. Courts can not afford two or three hours to one counsel, as a rule, and parishioners will not tolerate a discourse much more than half an hour in length, no matter how bril liant. The age has dwindled into one of after-dinner oratory. Probably it is none the worse for that. Oratory is a dangerous gift, on the whole, subjecting the reason of mankind to the influence of a cunning array of words and the sensuous charm of a melliflu ous voice. Everybody has seen the weightiest argu ment, couched in felicitous phrases, fall comparative ly flat on a popular audience because the speaker's voice was feeble and his manner dry. The wisest man who ever addressed an American audience, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an example of those defects. Silly people had no patience with his frequent hesitation, al though the result was to bring forth an expression fit to be handed down to all the ages. The present year is a painful reminder of the vice of public speaking. In fact, it is the Chairman's firm conviction that there is only one thing worse than running after stumpspeakers, and that is the reading of all the news papers. The English speakers who have most re cently come to our shores have been men of eminent oratorical talents, of a widely different kind — Cole ridge and Russell —the one suave, elegant, and tact ful, the other strong, manly, and orotund, both full of merit and discretion in the matter. Americans cannot at present produce two finer orators than these distinguished men. It is probable that the sway of oratory is much stronger in the South and West than in the East, and that there is a much more audible survival of the great traditions in the former than in the latter parts of this country. The nearest approach to the ancient power of the popular orator is now seen
