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news to be served up in every number, that it must choose the easiest way to meet the demand.
Now the easiest method is not to report a public address, in any proper sense, at all, but simply to call upon each public speaker to write out in advance what he means to say, and print it, often much curtailed, from his manuscript.
This is accordingly what is more and more done.
When any public demonstration of sufficient importance occurs-a meeting, or even a dinner-each person announced as a speaker for it knows that he will receive calls from reporters, or a letter from the Associated Press, requesting “a copy of his speech.”
It is a kind proposal, but it seems to assume that there is no such thing as spontaneity or freshness left in public oratory.
If he is a practised speaker the chances are that he does not yet know what he is going to say; that he will depend largely on the interest of the occasion, the atmosphere of the audience, the lead given by other speakers.
It is, at any rate, certain that the more he is guided by these things the fresher and more animated his speech will be. If he prepares ever so much, the chances are that the best things in his speech will have come to him on the spur of the moment.
This, indeed, is what
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1897.
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