sounds of
preparation--the music of the boisterous drums, the silver
voices of heroic bugles. We see thousands of assemblages, and
hear the appeals of orators; we see the pale cheeks of women and
the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all
the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers. We lose sight
of them no more. We are with them when they enlist in the great
army of freedom. We see them part from those they love. Some are
walking for the last time in quiet woody places with the maiden
they adore. We hear the whisperings and the sweet vows of
eternal love as they lingeringly part forever. Others are
bending over cradles, kissing babies that are asleep. Some are
receiving the blessings of old men. Some are parting from those
who hold them and press them to their hearts again and again,
and say nothing; and some are talking with wives, and
endeavoring with brave words spoken in the old tones to drive
from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We see the
wife standing in the door, with the babe in her arms--standing
in the sunlight sobbing; at the turn of the road a hand
waves--she answers by holding high in her loving hands the
child. He is gone--and forever.
--ROBERT J. INGERSOLL, _to the Soldiers of Indianapolis_.
8. Where would you pause in the following selections? Try pausing in
different places and note the effect it gives.
The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on: nor all your
piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all
your tears wash out a word of it.
The history of womankind is a story of abuse. For ages men beat,
sold, and abused their wives and daughters like cattle. The
Spartan mother that gave birth to one of her own sex disgraced
herself; the girl babies were often deserted in the mountains to
starve; China bound and deformed their feet; Turkey veiled their
faces; America denied them equal educational advantages with
men. Most of the world still refuses them the right to
participate in the government and everywhere women bear the
brunt of an unequal standard of morality.
But the women are on the march. They are walking upward to the
sunlit plains where the thinking people rule. China has ceased
binding their feet. In the shadow of the Harem Turkey has opened
a school for girls. America has given the women equal
educational advantages, and America, we believe, will
enfranchise them.
We can do little to help and not much to hinder this great
movement. The thinking people have put their O.K. upon it. It is
moving forward to its goal just as surely as this old earth is
swinging from the grip of winter toward the spring's blossoms
and the summer's harvest.[1]
9. Read aloud the following address, paying careful attention to pause
wherever the emphasis may thereby be heightened.
_THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT_
... At last, the Republican party has appeared. It avows, now,
as the Republican party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and
its works, "Equal and exact justice to all men." Even when it
first entered the field, only half organized, it struck a blow
which only just failed to secure complete and triumphant
victory. In this, its second campaign, it has already won
advantages which render that triumph now both easy and certain.
The secret of its assured success lies in that very
characteristic which, in the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its
great and lasting imbecility and reproach. It lies in the fact
that it is a party of one idea; but that is a noble one--an idea
that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of equality
of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all
are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.
I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and
all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty
senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in
Congress to-day sentiments and opinions and principles of
freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free State, dared
to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the
government of the United States, under the conduct of the
Democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain
and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United
States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering
together the forces with which to recover back again all the
fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound
and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the
Constitution and freedom forever.
--W.H. SEWARD.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From an editorial by D.C. in _Leslie's Weekly_, June 4,
1914. Used by permission.]
EFFICIENCY THROUGH INFLECTION
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet; now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still,
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!
With easy force it opens all the cells
Where Memory slept.
--WILLIAM COWPER, _The Task_.
Herbert Spencer remarked that "Cadence"--by which he meant the
modulation of the tones of the voice in speaking--"is the running
commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of the intellect." How
true this is will appear when we reflect that the little upward and
downward shadings of the