expenditure, the mass of the voters vote
in absolute ignorance of the candidates. The citizen who
supposes that he does all his duty when he votes, places a
premium upon political knavery. Thieves welcome him to the
polls and offer him a choice, which he has done nothing to
prevent, between Jeremy Diddler and Dick Turpin. The party
cries for which he is responsible are: "Turpin and Honesty,"
"Diddler and Reform." And within a few years, as a result of
this indifference to the details of public duty, the most
powerful politicians in the Empire State of the Union was
Jonathan Wild, the Great, the captain of a band of
plunderers.

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

Appropriate Diction. The final test of any diction is its
appropriateness. The man who talks of dignified things as he would of
a baseball game--unless he is doing it deliberately for humor,
caricature, or burlesque--is ruining his own cause. The man who
discusses trifles in the style of philosophy makes himself an
egregious bore. As Shakespeare said, "Suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep
not the modesty of nature."

Beware of the flowery expression; avoid metaphorical speech; flee from
the lure of the overwrought style. In the first place it is so
old-fashioned that audiences suspect it at once. It fails to move
them. It may plunge its user into ridiculous failure. In the
excitement of spontaneous composition a man sometimes takes risks. He
may--as Pitt is reported to have said he did--throw himself into a
sentence and trust to God Almighty to get him out. But a beginner had
better walk before he tries to soar. If he speaks surely rather than
amazingly his results will be better. The temptation to leave the
ground is ever present in speaking.

A Parliamentary debater describing the Church of England wound up in a
flowery conclusion thus: "I see the Church of England rising in the
land, with one foot firmly planted in the soil, the other stretched
toward Heaven!"

An American orator discussing the character of Washington discharged
the following.

The higher we rise in the scale of being--material,
intellectual, and moral--the more certainly we quit the
region of the brilliant eccentricities and dazzling contrasts
which belong to a vulgar greatness. Order and proportion
characterize the pr