THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEAKING. J. BERG ESENWEIN DALE CARNAGEY

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