Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/245

 The desire to learn and to understand was so general and so earnest that it would not brook any partisan interference.

As a public speaker I gathered in those meetings a very valuable experience. It is that, with such audiences as I have described—indeed with a majority of popular audiences—the desire to be informed and instructed is greater than the desire to be amusingly entertained. No doubt a joke or an anecdote with a witty point will make such hearers laugh. But there is a superior charm for them in a clear statement of an interesting subject and in lucidly logical reasoning. He who aims at making a lasting impression upon the minds and hearts of his hearers in a popular audience should take care not to undervalue their intelligence, their moral sense, and their self-respect. To carry conviction, the speaker must above all things make his hearers feel that he is himself convinced, and he cannot do that unless his argument be serious and his appeal thoroughly earnest. Persons who have never given much consideration to public matters will often begin to do so when you show them that you esteem them enough to expect that they will, and that you attach some importance to their attitude. You may sometimes create noble emotions by appealing to them as though they already existed.

At the beginning of my activity as a public speaker I made it my rule never to say anything in my speeches that I did not conscientiously believe to be true; never to hesitate to admit a mistake when I became convinced that I had made one; never to appeal to a prejudice or to a mean, narrow-minded selfish interest; to invoke only the highest order of motives—patriotism, the sense of right, justice, and honor; and never to miss an opportunity for reminding my hearers that it is the duty, the high privilege of this great American Republic to serve as the guiding-star to liberty-loving mankind as the