"ORATORY AND DEMOCRACY"

In his address to members of the University yesterday afternoon, on "Public Speaking and Democracy," William Jennings Bryan emphasized the need of influential public speaking in the democratic life of the present day. The orator has not been superseded by the press, but is needed now more than ever in order to correct its false assertions.

The primary object of speaking is to persuade. The orator is measured by his power to do this rather than by his power to please. There are two things essential to persuasion: the speaker must know what he is talking about, and he must mean what he says. Eloquence is the speech from heart to heart; a man must be moved in order to move others. If a man knows his subject and is sincere, he cannot fall to be an effective speaker. Clearness, which is a great aid to forceful speaking, aims at stating a truth so plainly that it cannot fail to be understood. If a man disputes a truth so stated, there is something wrong with him; his judgment is warped either by a false attitude of heart or else a pecuniary interest. In the first case, the thing to do is to ascertain the man's point of view. All men, said Jefferson, are divided into two natural parties; the democratic and the aristocratic. The former believes that society is built upon a firm foundation, the latter that it is suspended from the top. The democrat believes that if the condition of the common people is improved, society will be better; the aristocrat that, if you look after the well-to-do, some of their prosperity will leak down to the common people. If, however, the reason for his mental bias is a pecuniary one, only an appeal to his conscience will move him.

Two other things are great aids to effective speaking. If a man can speak with brevity and apiness of illustration, he will gain for his speech something of the effectiveness of the Book of Proverbs and the eloquence of the parables of Christ. The more homely the illustration, the better it is. The more pointedly a thing is expressed, the more easily it is grasped. The great man is the man who can fix in an epigram the dominant idea of his day. Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt have done this. When Colonel Roosevelt said in his Paris speech, "Whenever human rights and property rights conflict, human rights must take the lead," he was expressing the dominant thought of democratic government today. And that, says Mr. Bryan, was Colonel Roosevelt's greatest speech.

In the last four or five years there has been a great growth of democratic ideas the world over. In every country the government has drawn closer to the people. In Russia, the Duma has been set up; in China, a constitutional government has been started with an organic law and a senate; in Turkey, the same step has been taken; in England, the Budget was passed over the veto of the House of Lords; and in this country, the overthrow of Cannonism by progressive Republicans and progressive Democrats has been a triumph for democracy.