he secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn
of labor or poverty or the rough of farming. His hard head went
through in childhood the drill of Calvinism, with text and
mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer
bit of New England than any, and flings his sarcasms right and left.
He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils and
to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head.
This man scornfully renounces your civil organizations,--county, or
city, or governor, or army,--is his own navy and artillery, judge and
jury, legislature and executive. He has learned his lessons in a
bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best
university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet
of the mobs.
He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
character and insight. Let him see that his speech is not differenced
from action; that, when he has spoken, he has not done nothing, nor
done wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to
wholesome exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He
cannot be defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection
in him, an immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give
value to their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for
not being convinced, but he that cannot convince them. He should mould
them, armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core
of their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is
to convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.
The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment. It is what
is called affirmative truth, and has the property of invigorating the
hearer; and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he feels himself
addressed on grounds which will remain when everything else is taken,
and which have no trace of time or place or party. Everything hostile
is stricken down in the presence of the sentiments; their majesty is
felt by the most obdurate. It is observable, that, as soon as one acts
for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for, will
and must work; and the men least accustomed to appeal to these
sentiments invariably recall them when they address nations. Napoleon,
even, must accept and use it as he can.
It is only to th
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