ng aspirants in the
local debating class, and openly boasted of the clever tricks by which
he had done so. For once, however, he was "hoist on his own petard."

CHAPTER XVII

RHETORIC

It is the function of language to convey ideas. Ideas are the real
foundation of good lecturing and words must always be subordinate.

The English Parliamentarian, Gladstone, had the reputation of being able
to say less in more time than any man who ever lived. The difference
between a good and a bad use of words is well illustrated in the
discussion between Gladstone and Huxley on Genesis and Science. Of
course everybody knows now that Gladstone was annihilated, in spite of
the cleverness with which, when beaten, he would, in Huxley's phrase,
"retreat under a cloud of words."

Grandiloquence will produce, in the more intelligent of your audience,
an amused smile, and while it is well to have your hearers smile with
you, they should never have reason to smile at you.

Here again, a great deal depends on what you have been reading. In the
use of good, clear, powerful English, Prof. Huxley is without a peer,
and his "collected essays" will always remain a precious heritage in
English literature. For an example of the exact opposite, take the
magazines and pamphlets of the so-called new thought, which at bottom is
neither "new" nor "thought." In reality it is made up of words, words,
and then--more words.

* * * * *

I read a fifteen hundred word article, in a new thought magazine, by one
of its foremost prophets, and nowhere from beginning to end, was there a
single tangible idea, nothing but a long drawn out mass of meaningless
jargon.

* * * * *

"Thus spake Zarathustra" is the same thing at its best. As an example of
a style to be carefully avoided the following is in point. It is also a
rara avis; a gem of purest ray. It is taken from the local Socialist
platform of an Arizona town:

Therefore, it matters not, though the Creator decked the earth
with prolific soil, and deposited within great stores of wealth
for man's enjoyment, for, if Economic Equality is ostracised,
man is enslaved and the world surges through space around the
sun, a gilded prison. It matters not, though the infinite blue
vast be sown with innumerable stars and the earth be adorned
with countless beauties, teeming with the multiplicity of living
forms