Harvard's Duty to the Country.

It would seem probable, that in America, with the historic facts to urge it on, the American people would cultivate oratory not only as a fine art, but as one of the most indispensable of forces among a free people. Such, unfortunately, is not the case. Indeed, it may be said that among those to whom the higher education of our people has been intrusted - our colleges, for instance - the very opposite course of conduct prevails. Harvard College has not had a professor of oratory for three generations, and this too despite the fact that again and again its graduates and friends have urged it to change its ways and condescend to teach its graduates how to address, in a well-bred yet forcible way, a primary or a town meeting. The only instruction to-day in oratory in that college where its other professors have creditable salaries, is given by a young man called to the inferior office of an instructor on a salary less than that paid to an ordinary butler at the West End. So at Harvard our young men can study Sanscrit or Anglo Saxon, but get no training in the queen of arts, public oratory. By consequence, Harvard men when they go on the stump or platform generally show breeding and culture, and an amazing absence of oratorical power.

Harvard College (and its eminency in this misbehavior is only aggravated by its eminency in other scolastic virtues) undertakes not to make orators and succeeds to the dot.

For this singular hostility to an undoubted need and trust on the part of many of our higher seminaries of learning, there are diverse reasons, more or less radical and cogent, more or less obscure or plain. First of all, this temper is a reaction against the spread eagle and unkempt oratory of frontier and semi-civilized congressmen in the old days whose deliverances in the Capitol were often grotesque and amusing - speech run mad and descending into oblivion in a very whirlwind of sound. Diseased oratory should give place to orators duly taught by our colleges, which exist to teach uses. It is treason to the republic to send untrained orators into the forum, since the will of many crystallized into laws and oratory is a supreme force to shape the crystals. An unreasoning and ultra-conservative distrust of any ability in any to find or to teach any adequate system of oratory is another reason for the neglect of our colleges to teach oratory. Assuming that the old inability is still upon us, colleges that forty years ago miserably failed to teach oratory still cry out, "We care not. Let a man pick up his oratory. Go and be like Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips, if you can; but don't bother us asking from us the impossible."

But all this is a confession of their failure to educate the people in a very important matter, and shows surely that they refuse to live level with their own times. It is quite as possible to teach oratory at Cambridge as it is to teach chemistry or mathematics, and with quite as satisfactory results. There are to-day and here methods and systems and teachers of oratory adequate to the need, and if Harvard objects that these systems are fragmentary or unfinished, she has both money and leisure enough to take them in hand with her own chosen officials and make them satisfactory. What she has done for generations is to ignore them all and put nothing in their place to supply the public need. What a red flag is to a bull, the word "elocution" is to an average middle-aged official of more colleges than one. President Eliot's clear, ringing voice is meanly supplemented by the weak and indistinct utterances of a great multitude of his students when heard in public. If public oratory be a need in this republic, public oratory Harvard College must teach; so far as it is the public servant in the higher education, it will teach. - Transcript.