Increasing Personal Efficiency

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SOME OF THE CHAPTERS ARE:-

1. Power

2. Musical culture

3. Oratory

Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the living man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the restoration of the science and the art of oratory.

The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong. It was such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw.

There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly born with men and women—as the power of the true poet and the true teacher—yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the later science is persuasive—it has to do mainly with influencing the head and the heart.