The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
The way a man handles his egoisms is a test of his mastery over an
audience or a class of readers. What we want to know about the person
who is to counsel or lead us is just what he is, and nobody can tell us
so well as himself. Every real master of speaking or writing uses his
personality as he would any other serviceable material; the very moment
a speaker or writer begins to use it, not for his main purpose, but for
vanity's sake, as all weak people are sure to do, hearers and readers
feel the difference in a moment. Mr. Beecher is a strong, healthy man,
in mind and body. His nerves have never been corrugated with alcohol;
his thinking-marrow is not brown with tobacco-fumes, like a meerschaum,
as are the brains of so many unfortunate Americans; he is the same
lusty, warm-blooded, strong-fibred, brave-hearted, bright-souled,
clear-eyed creature that he was when the college boys at Amherst
acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football-kickers. He has
the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in
bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self-revelation is a
thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common
trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus
it is, that, wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has
addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they
had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a
multitude that look upon him as if he were their brother.
Having magnetized his Glasgow audience, he continued the subject already
opened at Manchester by showing, in the midst of that great toiling
population, the deadly influence exerted by Slavery in bringing labor
into contempt, and its ruinous consequences to the free working-man
everywhere. In Edinburgh he explained how the Nation grew up out of
separate States, each jealous of its special sovereignty; how the
struggle for the control of the united Nation, after leaving it for a
long time in the hands of the South, to be used in favor of Slavery, at
length gave it into those of the North, whose influence was to be for
Freedom; and that for this reason the South, when it could no longer
rule the Nation, rebelled against it. In Liverpool, the centre of vast
commercial and manufacturing interests, he showed how those interests
are injured by Slavery,--"that this attempt to cover the fairest portion
of the earth with a slave-population that buys nothing, and a degraded
white population that buys next to nothing, should array against it the
sympathy of every true political economist and every thoughtful and
far-seeing manufacturer, as tending to strike at the vital want of
commerce,--not the want of cotton, but the want of customers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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