much. Study the following selections to
see how the concrete phraseology used makes the material more telling,
how it enforces the meaning. Pick out the best expressions and explain
why they are better than more general terms. In the first, note how
the last sentence drives home the meaning of the first two. Listeners
may understand the first two, they remember the last.

Civil and religious liberty in this country can be preserved
only through the agency of our political institutions. But
those institutions alone will not suffice. It is not the ship
so much as the skilful sailing that assures the prosperous
voyage.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS: _The Public Duty of Educated
Men_, 1877

Describe the significance of the best expressions in the following
speech made in Parliament by Thomas Babington Macaulay.

All those fierce spirits whom you hallooed on to harass us
now turn round and begin to worry you. The Orangeman raises
his war-whoop; Exeter Hall sets up its bray; Mr. Macneill
shudders to see more costly cheer than ever provided for the
Priest of Baal at the table of the Queen; and the Protestant
operatives of Dublin call for impeachments in exceedingly bad
English. But what did you expect? Did you think when, to
serve your turn, you called the devil up that it was as easy
to lay him as to raise him? Did you think when you went on,
session after session, thwarting and reviling those whom you
knew to be in the right, and flattering all the worst
passions of those whom you knew to be in the wrong, that the
day of reckoning would never come? It has come. There you
sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years.

Why was the style of the extract below especially good for the evident
purpose and audience? Why did the author use names for the candidates?

When an American citizen is content with voting merely, he
consents to accept what is often a doubtful alternative. His
first duty is to help shape the alternative. This, which was
formerly less necessary, is now indispensable. In a rural
community such as this country was a hundred years-ago,
whoever was nominated for office was known to his neighbors,
and the consciousness of that knowledge was a conservative
influence in determining nominations. But in the local
elections of the great cities of today, elections that
control taxation and