remark. Was it the gabble of the goose, the buzz of the mosquito, the pecking of an old hen, the belching of a buzzard, or the striking of the snake in the grass? One of these, it is bound to have been. Perhaps if you can decide which one, it may help you to be more considerate next time. The Little Old School of the Home Irving Bacheller This is an extract from a speech at the annual banquet of the New England Society, 1913. The sly humor running through the first half of this declamation should be appreciated and expressed. Next to the last paragraph begins the application of the story. Pause at this point and express the greater seriousness as you begin "to point a moral," and the seriousness should be sustained to the end. WHEN I was eight years old I became a candidate for President of the United States. The nomination was a genuine surprise, for I had made no effort to secure it. As a matter of fact there were many things that looked better to me; I would have preferred the position of bass drummer in the band at the county fair, but there were those who thought they knew what I wanted better than I did. We lived in the land of Silas Wright, who spent more time declining honors than did other statesmen in trying to get them. His party wanted him to run for President, but he wouldn't. My father said that all I had to do was to be as good and as great as Silas Wright and my election was sure. Governor Wright had been dead for twenty years. I soon learned that he was the greatest man that ever died-there is no distinction like that. I had no sooner got command of the theory and technique of one of his virtues than he assumed another. When I had acquired his gift of working all day and studying a part of the night, they told me that he always spent an hour in the garden, pulling weeds before breakfast. I began to understand why he was dead and also why he was so talented. Everybody was watching me and nobody was watching Silas. By and by I discovered that there were other candidates for President in the neighborhood. The Silas game had also been tried on them. We candidates got together one day over in Howard's grove and discussed the issues. We were sick of the campaign -too many weeds in it. We all withdrew and ran away from school and spent a joyful afternoon at the old swimmin' hole. Next morning I came downstairs at breakfast time and found that the teacher had been there. I observed a general air of depression in the family. My father said in a kindly tone: that you intended to be President." I told him that I had withdrawn. "I thought Then he said: "Will you please come with me?" I went. It was a beautiful summer morning, as calm as he. A song sparrow tried to hold up my heart. A squirrel looked down at me from a tree-top as if he had a hole to recommend. I followed in silence through the garden walk and out under the orchard boughs. Not a word was spoken. My father stopped and cut a sprout from one of the trees and then another and trimmed them as he walked. He stopped and whittled, looking down thoughtfully. I stood near him. After a moment of silence he said: "I suppose you know the object of this meeting." I admitted that I did. Suddenly I heard a boy yelling down in the valley. It was the voice of an ex-candidate. In a minute he knew that I was with him. After all, what did this striving to be angels and Presidents amount to? Not one of us was ever elected. Such was the little republic of the home when I was a boy. It had its chief magistrate, its small legislature, its department of justice. It had a little school of its own in which men were made. Two things were taught in it-loyalty and faith. Loyalty to the home and its ideals; faith in one's self. We've no more use for that little school. Too small! too much trouble! we are so busy making money and spending it we can't bother with making men. We educate our children by the thousand and no longer by the one. It's cheaper. Our learning, like our living, is syndicated. There are six men who have done all the big things accomplished in America since 1850. They are: Commodore Vanderbilt, who gave us the railroad system; Abraham Lincoln, our greatest statesman; Thomas A. Edison, our greatest inventor; Horace Greeley, our greatest journalist; Samuel L. Clemens, our most original novelist; Walt Whitman, our greatest poet. Every one of them born in a cabin and mother made educated in the little school of the home and only therenever went to college! I mention this not in disparagement of the college, but only that the little old school of the home shall have its proper credit. The Greatest Battle Ever Won The combined sentiment and rhythm of poetry are pleasing to the ear. Orators are therefore wont to close their speeches with an appropriate poetic quotation. Notice how the stanzas quoted at the close of this selection re-enforce the theme-self-mastery-and form a climax of the whole. Special effort should be made to deliver the lines in rather slow rate and strong, round, full tones, at the same time not failing to place the emphasis so as to bring out the thought. It was not on the bloody fields of Austerlitz or Waterloo, where Napoleon won and was vanquished; it was not at Gettysburg where the greatest struggle of modern warfare was witnessed; it was in none of the titanic battles in which the Russians were overthrown by the Japanese; it was not at Verdun or Lemberg: no, it is not on the fields of carnage and strife that the greatest battles of human history are fought and won, but it is in the depths of the human spirit itself that this victory is wrought, for the wisest of men has truly affirmed, "Greater is he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." The noblest standard ever erected had emblazoned on it these stirring words, "I conquer myself!" Self-mastery is the greatest as well as the rarest of virtues. Alexander the Great, whom his enemies could not check in his renowned conquest of the world, was he not overthrown and conquered by his own appetites and passions, the enchantment of the wine cup? Was it not the quenchless ambition of Napoleon's spirit that drove him to leave Elba's shores and again take up arms against a combined Europe? Did it not lead to his final overthrow and complete defeat? How many more less eminent but truly as human as the two great masters of warfare just named, have been lured and engulfed forever in their own passionate desires and selfish hates? What are riches and honors to men who are the slaves of their own passions? What the grandeur of a throne to him who is dethroned by ambition and lust? How long or how well we live "not years but actions tell." He lives best and wisest who, while ruling his own spirit, overcomes every obstacle in the pathway to a noble and worthy success, and wins a place in the hearts of his fellows not by the conquest of the sword, but by the sweet ministries of love and tender regard. Let the motivepower be not mere brute force, not the military spirit, but rather the spirit breathed in these lines by the poet Henley: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, In the fell touch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud, |