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It appeared that his bravery was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it had been given in the city not long since. He had her ideas, and he won multitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow of rhetoric.
There was a sound in that word "crawl" typical of the abject humility to which working shoemakers were subjected by their employers, which specially aroused the feelings of the meeting. "And whence comes the battle?" The orator paused, and the glasses were jammed upon the table.
It is encouraging to the student of public speaking to recall that this distinguished orator at first had serious natural defects to overcome. His voice was weak, he stammered in his speech, and was painfully diffident.
The same evening as the orator uttered his speech it ran along the telegraph wires, across the states of the Union, with a speed of 348,447 miles a second.
Just as eight o'clock struck from the fulminating clock of the large hall, Barbicane, as if moved by a spring, jumped up; a general silence ensued, and the orator, in a slightly emphatic tone, spoke as follows: "Brave colleagues, It is some time since an unfruitful peace plunged the members of the Gun Club into deplorable inactivity.
Ashton Chalmers had listened to the Socialist orator, and he had gone away and read and investigated; he had realized the force of this great world movement for economic justice, he had broken the bonds and barriers of his class, and told the truth about what he saw coming.
Pericles pronounced a funeral oration on those who had fallen and stimulated his countrymen to continued resistance, and excited their patriotic sentiments. Thus far the anticipations of the statesman and orator had been more than realized.
Then it transpired that there were four candidates in the field; a Congressman, an ex-Governor, a silver-tongued orator named Stringer, who was a member of the upper branch of the State Legislature and who claimed to be a true defender of popular rights, and Hon. James O. Lyons.
When an orator calls the French Revolution "the greatest, the most un-mixed, the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had in modern times, unless, perhaps, we may possibly except the Reformation," there will be those who differ who will grant the beneficent results of revolutions, as of wild storms of nature, but who will hesitate to call a movement of which the September days, the noyades, and the bloody fury of a brutal mob were incidents, the most unmixed and the most unstained of blessings.
He was a high-minded man "quantum licuit;" i.e., as far as a debased age allowed of high-mindedness. His domestic life was clouded by sorrow. His death was an irremediable blow, which the orator bewails in the preface to his sixth book. The passage is instructive as revealing the taste of the day.
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