A Guide to the Discussion or Statement of Facts Section of Your Speech

This is the main portion of an address and should be marked throughout by sound logic and common sense. It is well for the speaker to begin with facts that are familiar to the audience, they will then more readily follow his leadership into new and uncertain fields of inquiry.

The essential elements to be observed are unity, order, movement. By unity is meant singleness of idea and freedom from unnecessary digression. There must be an intelligent order throughout, to give clearness to the spoken word. There must also be movement, or development, that the speech may make progress and bring the hearer to his destination. This is the very life of discourse, without which public speaking would be both uninteresting and unprofitable.

Iteration, the repetition of a word or phrase, if not overdone, may frequently add force and clearness to a speech. A good illustration of this is the following passage from Matthew Arnold:

The practical genius of our people could not but urge irresistibly to the production of a real prose style, because for the purposes of modern life the old English prose, the prose of Milton and Taylor, is cumbersome, unavailable, impossible. A style of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance, was wanted. These are the qualities of a serviceable prose style. Poetry was a different logic, as Coleridge said, from prose. But there is no doubt that a style of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance, will acquire a yet stronger hold upon the mind of a nation if it is adopted in poetry as well as in prose, and so comes to govern both. This is what happened in France . To the practical, modern, and social genius of the French a true prose was indispensable. They produced one of conspicuous excellence, supremely powerful and influential in the last century, the first to come and standing at first alone, a modern prose. French prose is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. With little opposition from any deep-seated and imperious poetic instincts, the French made their poetry also conform to the law which was molding their prose. French poetry became marked with the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.

A speech should have the two elements of convincingness and persuasiveness. The first appeals to the intellect, the second appeals to the heart of the listener. The interblending of the two qualities produces the most satisfactory address. The first demands mere statement of fact, cold logic and cogent reasoning; the second, by its warmth and color, stirs the emotions and moves the hearer to action.

The following is an illustration of the convincing style, without any attempt to move the feelings:

My lords, the meaning of this maxim, "that a man shall not disable himself," is solely this: that a man shall not disable himself by his own wilful crime; and such a disability the law will not allow him to plead. If a man contracts to sell an estate to any person upon certain terms at such a time, and in the meantime he sells it to another, he shall not be allowed to say, "Sir, I can not fulfil my contract; it is out of my power; I have sold my estate to another." Such a plea would be no bar to an action, because the act of his selling it to another is the very breach of contract. So, likewise, a man who hath promised marriage to one lady, and afterward marries another, can not plead in bar of a prosecution from the first lady that he is already married, because his marrying the second lady is the very breach of promise to the first.

A man shall not be allowed to plead that he was drunk in bar of a criminal prosecution, tho perhaps he was at the time as incapable of the exercise of reason as if he had been insane, because his drunkenness was itself a crime. He shall not be allowed to excuse one crime by another. The Roman soldier, who cut off his thumbs, was not suffered to plead his disability for the service to procure his dismission with impunity, because his incapacity was designedly brought on him by his own willful fault. And I am glad to observe so good an agreement among the judges upon this point, who have stated it with great precision and clearness.

When it was said, therefore, that "a man can not plead his crime in excuse for not doing what he is by law required to do/' it only amounts to this, that he can not plead in excuse what, when pleaded, is no excuse; but there is not in this the shadow of an objection to his pleading what is an excuse-pleading a legal disqualification. If he is nominated to be a justice of the peace, he may say, "I can not be a justice of the peace, for I have not a hundred pounds a year." In like manner, a Dissenter may plead, "I have not qualified, and I can not qualify, and am not obliged to qualify; and you have no right to fine me for not serving."

"The Case of Evans." LORD MANSFIELD.

The following is a splendid example of both styles combined :

I plead not for a murderer. I have no inducement, no motive to do so. I have addressed my fellow citizens in many various relations, when rewards of wealth and fame awaited me. I have been cheered on other occasions by manifestations of popular approbation and sympathy; and where there was no such encouragement, I had at least the gratitude of him whose cause I defended. But I speak now in the hearing of a people who have prejudged the prisoner, and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion. My child, with an affectionate smile, disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give, because he says "God bless you" as I pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I fill his manger. But what reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can I expect here? There the prisoner sits.

Look at him. Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill-suppressed censures and their excited fears, and tell me where, among my neighbors or my fellow men, where, even in his heart, I can expect to find the sentiment, the thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment, but even of recognition. I sat here two weeks during the preliminary trial. I stood here, between the prisoner and the jury, nine hours, and pleaded for the wretch that he was insane and did not even know he was on trial; and, when all was done, the jury thought, at least eleven of them thought, that I had been deceiving them, or was self-deceived. They read signs of intelligence in his idiotic smile, and of cunning and malice in his stolid insensibility.

They rendered a verdict that he was sane enough to be tried-a contemptible compromise verdict in a capital case; and then they looked on, with what emotions God and they alone know, upon his arraignment. The district attorney, speaking in his adder ear, bade him rise, and, reading to him one indictment, asked him whether he wanted a trial, and the poor fool answered no. Have you counsel? No. And they went through the same mockery, the prisoner giving the same answers, until a third indictment was thundered in his ears, and he stood before the court silent, motionless, and bewildered. Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate, before Heaven and you, that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the prisoner at the bar does not, at this moment, know why it is that my shadow falls on you instead of his own.

"The Defense of William Freeman." W. H. SEWARD.