R

INGERSOLL

OBERT G. INGERSOLL is best known

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as an infidel and an active enemy of Christianity. In that capacity we have nothing to do with him in this place. He was also, however, one of the most marvellous masters of modern rhetorical display — what I have called a trance orator." He could enter into an exalted dreamy mood and weave pictures of the most fascinating brilliancy. The pathetic atmosphere perhaps suited him best. In this style of oratory sentiment has taken the place of passion. Sentiment pleases, but it does not move men to do. Ingersoll entertained thousands; he convinced or changed the opinions of few.

Oratory of this kind is eminently suited to special occasions, such as Decoration Day, Fourth of July, and the like. People are out for a holiday. No great question is at stake, no important argument can be made, but the sentimental mind can be exalted. It is an occasion for stimulating patriotism, for leading the mind into fields it is not accustomed to enter, and for calling forth unsuspected emotions.

This is very much the style of the most successful pulpit oratory. Sunday has become a

holiday, and people go to church to get a pious entertainment, a little sentimental or intellectual or moral fillip for the week. Modern preachers would do well to study Ingersoll, not for his arguments against Christianity, but for his method of speaking.

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The following selection, the peroration of his Decoration Day oration in 1888, is a composition which has seldom been surpassed. The vision of war was written many years before; but to it for the occasion the speaker added a vision of the future." Of course the whole was merely recited from memory. Displays of this kind when extemporary are seldom perfect enough in detail to bear reporting and subsequent reading; and speeches like this which are delivered extemporaneously have been rewritten by their authors for the special purposes of publication.

A VISION OF WAR AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE

(DECORATION DAY ORATION, 1888)

HE past rises before me like a dream. Again

THE

we are in the great struggle for national life. We hear the sounds of preparation the music of boisterous drums the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see thousands of assemblages, and hear the appeals of orators. We see the pale cheeks of women, and the flushed faces of men;

and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers. We lose sight of them no more. We are with them when they enlist in the great army of freedom. We see them part with those they love. Some are walking for the last time in quiet, woody places, with the maidens they adore. We hear the whisperings and the sweet vows of eternal love as they lingeringly part for ever. Others are bending over cradles, kissing babes that are asleep. Some are receiving the blessings of old men. Some are parting with mothers who hold them and press them to their hearts again and again, and say nothing. Kisses and tears, tears and kisses; divine mingling of agony and love! And some are talking with wives, and endeavouring with brave words, spoken in the old tones, to drive from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We see the wife standing in the door with the babe in her arms standing in the sunlight sobbing. At the turn of the road a hand waves she answers

by holding high in her loving arms the child. He is gone, and for ever.

We see them all as they march proudly away under the flaunting flags, keeping time to the grand, wild music of war marching down the streets of the great cities through the towns and across the prairies down to the fields of glory, to do and to die for the eternal right.

We go with them, one and all. We are by their side on all the gory fields—in all the hospitals of pain on all the weary marches. We stand guard with them on the wild storm and under the quiet stars. We are with them in ravines running with blood in the furrows of old fields. We are with

them between contending hosts, unable to move, wild with thirst, the life ebbing slowly away among the withered leaves. We see them pierced by balls and torn with shells, in the trenches, by forts, and in the whirlwind of the charge, where men become iron, with nerves of steel.

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We are with them in the prisons of hatred and famine; but human speech can never tell what they endured.

We are at home when the news comes that they are dead. We see the maiden in the shadow of her first sorrow. We see the silvered head of the old

man bowed with, the last grief.

The past rises before us, and we see four millions of human beings governed by the lash! We see them bound hand and foot; we hear the strokes of cruel whips; we see the hounds tracking women through tangled swamps; we see babes sold from the breasts of mothers. Cruelty unspeakable! Outrage infinite!

Four million bodies in chains four million souls in fetters! All the sacred relations of wife, mother, father, and child trampled beneath the brutal feet of might. And all this was done under our own beautiful banner of the free.

The past rises before us. We hear the roar and shriek of the bursting shell. The broken fetters fall. These heroes died. We look. Instead of slaves we see men and women and children. The wand of progress touches the auction block, the slave pen, the whipping post, and we see homes and firesides and school-houses and books, and where all was want and crime and cruelty and fear, we see the faces of the free.

These heroes are dead. They died for libertythey died for us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vinès. They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless Palace of Rest. Earth may run red with other wars - they are at peace. In the. midst of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death. I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: Cheers for the living; tears for the dead.

A vision of the future rises:

I see our country filled with happy homes, with firesides of content, the foremost land of all the earth.

I see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth.

"I see a world without a slave. Man at last is free. Nature's forces have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame, and all the secret, subtle powers of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race.

I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music's myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth, - a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labour reaps its full reward; where work and worth go hand in hand; where the poor girl trying to win bread with the needle the needle, that has been called “the asp for the breast