appeal to the power of local association.

The place, the anniversary after half a century, the importance of the event commemorated, as seen in the present prosperity of the nation as its result, these are made prominent at the outset. The audience responds, and their interest is immediately enlisted in what is to follow.

2. The purpose for which the assembly is convened is then announced. It is the keynote of the oration, and must not be delayed.

That purpose is not merely the appropriate laying of the corner stone, but the arousing of sustained resolution and enthusiasm for the completion of the monument, as a gift by the nation in voluntary offerings, gratefully and cheerfully bestowed. This purpose must be kept in mind during the analytic examination of the entire speech. The orator does not for a moment lose sight of it.

He concedes the fact (see Oration, page 34) that "the record of illustrious actions is most safely deposited in the universal remembrance of mankind," and yet he claims, as an adequate reason for rearing the monument, "that this structure may proclaim the magnitude and importance of that event (the battle) to every class and age"; the ignorant beholder and the youngest schoolboy must see, each for himself, the visible embodiment of a nation's remembrance. Thus is placed before the present assembly, and spread broadcast before the whole people of the Republic, the noble idea of treasuring up the inspirations of the great anniversary, and making them effective for the purpose it was designed to further.

Now the way is clear for argument and appeal, by which that purpose may be reënforced and assent to it be won. This part of the oration is concluded (page 35) by the glowing and picturesque sentence: "Let it rise! let it rise till it meet the sun in his coming! let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit!" Thus is the picture of the finished structure indelibly impressed upon the minds of all.

Immediately the orator proceeds from the secondary to the larger reasons which call for the popular assent to the purpose of the day.

3. The blessings which surround the citizens of the Republic, as the result of their forefathers' courage and sacrifices, are set forth to awaken gratitude and a sense of obligation. Even the "brightened prospects of the world" are invoked, to heighten the effect produced by the orator's enumeration of the privileges and blessings enjoyed by those whose lot is cast in this favored land.

4. The power of this appeal to the liberal spirit of the age is enhanced by an immediate reference to the survivors of the battle and to the veterans of the Revolution, whom the orator addresses in impassioned words. Their sacrifices are made real by a brief, but vivid, description of the battle itself, on the very spot consecrated to Liberty. This felicitous presentation of the claims of the veterans to lasting remembrance and honor, is made still more effective by the introduction of an apostrophe to Warren (page 38), as if the patriot soldier were himself,

at the moment, looking down upon the pageant and into the faces of the "venerable men," some of whom he might have led in that heroic day of conflict.

The presence of Lafayette afforded the opportunity to call him, also, as a witness whose silent testimony might favor the orator's purpose and create an abiding interest in its fulfillment.

These parenthetical allusions to the battle and to Lafayette were managed (if we may use this term, in our calm analysis of the oration as a work of art) with consummate skill. The orator saved himself the necessity of a prolonged story of the fight, familiar to his hearers, by directing chief attention to the causes which led to the event on Bunker Hill, the lofty patriotism it evoked from one end of the country to the other, and the important consequences which flowed from it as the first real battle of the Revolution.

Among these results was an increase of foreign sympathy for the struggling colonists; and now, with great tact, by a graceful turn, Lafayette is brought forward as a foreign friend whose sympathy led him to join the colonists in their effort to be free from the English yoke. Lafayette is also called "fortunate" in being present at the laying of the corner stone of the monument, another subtle but potent argument for the completion of the structure, which the orator constantly keeps in mind.

5. The reappearance at this point of the orator's allusion to great changes for good during the half-century just past, is an apt and skillful method for confirming his

auditors' confidence in their free institutions.

This con

fidence will lead to the desire to perpetuate those institutions, and, incidentally, to assist in the purpose which brought them together on that auspicious day.

This recurrence to the thoughts on the theme introduced earlier in the discourse is for a somewhat different purpose from that which those thoughts served in the first instance. They are repeated here, and their enumeration is enlarged, to enhance the force of the speaker's appeal to the hearer's sense of obligation. He exhibits now, for the first time in the oration, the superiority of American Republicanism and the glory of a free government "by the people and for the people.”

Incidentally, and as if the reference forced itself upon his mind, the orator alludes to the Greeks struggling for their independence and to revolutions in South America, intending to create a sympathetic feeling for those peoples, but chiefly to show, by contrast, how much more the citizens of the United States have to be thankful for than any other nation on the earth.

6. The transition is now easy to the conclusion (page 52), in which the orator strives to impress upon his auditors and the inhabitants of the whole favored land, the duties they owe: duties incumbent upon them as the inheritors of the precious legacy of liberty, purchased by the blood and bequeathed by the courage and the endurance of their fathers.

"Let the sacred obligations which have devolved on this generation and on us sink deep into our hearts. . . .

We can win no laurels in a war for independence,

but there remains to us a great duty of defense and preservation."

The last sentence of the peroration returns again, by a subtle oratorical device, to the subject of the monument, set forth in a figure, but none the less suggestive because indirect: "Let our object be 'our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country.' And by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever.”

The art of the orator is seen in the enunciation of the noblest sentiments and the enforcing of the grandest motives, with an eloquence which seems to place the mere erection of the monument in the background; while in reality the object of the meeting, to create a public feeling of interest in favor of the structure to be reared upon the corner stone that day set in its place, is never for an instant forgotten.

We have, then, in this oration, in a general way, the model of what a speech should be in its construction and in the adjustment of its several parts. First, the introduction, or prelude, to awaken and engage the attention of the audience; next, the proposition, or statement of the purpose of the discourse; then, the arguments which commend or prove the subject-matter, with such appeals to the intellect or the emotions as may be appropriate to