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into exercise the latent powers of his mind that otherwise might have
slept and slumbered. Such an organization has proved a valuable means of
improvement to many persons in their early studies. The Irish orator,
Curran, was indebted to such a "club" for much of the renown that
attached to his after life. He was modest and retiring even to
bashfulness, and had a very marked defect in his articulation, so that
his schoolmates called him "stuttering Jack Curran." He joined a
"debating club," determined to improve if possible, but there one of the
first flings he received was to be called "Orator Mum," in consequence
of his being so frightened when he arose to speak that he was not able
to say a word. But he persevered until he became the champion of the
"club," and laid the foundation of his future eminence as an orator. A
living American statesman, who has already made his mark upon the land
of his birth, considers the influence of a debating society to which he
belonged in his youth, among the first stimulating causes of the course
he has pursued. The highly distinguished English statesman, Canning,
organized a House of Commons among his play-fellows at school, where a
speaker was regularly elected, and ministerial and opposition parties
were formed, and debates carried on, in imitation of Parliament. Canning
became the star of this juvenile organization, and there began to
develop those powers by which, a few years after, as another has said,
"he ruled the House as a man rules the high-bred steed, as Alexander
ruled Bucephalus, of whom it was said the horse and the rider were
equally proud." Henry Clay, the American orator, said to some young men,
"I owe my success in life chiefly to one circumstance,--that I commenced
and continued for years the process of daily reading and speaking upon
the contents of some historical or scientific book. These off-hand
efforts were made, sometimes in a cornfield, at others in the forest,
and not unfrequently in some distant barn, with the horse and ox for my
auditors. It is to this early practice of the art of all arts that I am
indebted for the primary and leading impulses that stimulated me onward,
and have shaped and moulded my subsequent destiny." What speaking to the
forest trees and beasts of the stall was to Clay, that was the debating
society to Nat. It was a place where he could use the knowledge he
acquired by reading, while, at the same time, his mind was stimulated to