Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/26

 oratory, eloquence, or the faculty of an orator is a gift of nature, or can be taught by a teacher like those Greek professors of philosophy who professed to be able to teach eloquence, or by careful study of Demosthenes and Cicero, and other great orators.

Dogmatists have been heard to affirm that they could by education out of any human being make a great philosopher, a great statesman, or a great orator, as surely as a shoemaker out of a given piece of leather could make a good pair of shoes. Two thousand years before this dogmatic assertion was made, Socrates in the Gorgias of Plato asks Gorgias what the art was which he practised. "Rhetoric," answered Gorgias. "You are then a rhetorician?" "A good one." "And you are capable of making others so?" "I profess to be capable." It must be noted that the Greek word ῤἡτωρ, denoting a public speaker or orator as well as a rhetorician or teacher of rhetoric, the meaning of Gorgias was that he professed to be capable of making men not merely rhetoricians but orators. Cicero also wrote much with the object of showing that eloquence or the faculty of an orator was susceptible of being taught. Alas! of the hundreds of medallists, double firsts, senior, second, &c., wranglers, how few have turned out great orators,