THE SPEAKING PRIZES

The dead hand of endowment has again brought to the fore the competition for the Lee Wade and Boylston Prizes for Elocution. To some thirty or forty men, that competition means a chance to recite some recognized literary gem in hopes of winning a cash prize. To all others who pay any attention to it, the Lee Wade and Boylston competition represents a revival of the old jade of elocution, strangely out of place in a modern college.

To declaim in measured tone, to weigh each gesture carefully, to poise and balance gracefully upon the stage may once have been the aims of public speaking, but they are relics of an era that considered what was said less important than how it was said. The Lee Wade and Boylston contests have been lauded for encouraging public speaking, and an interest in great orations. Public speaking certainly has its place in the modern scheme of education. But the public speaking that is merely parrot like elocution is designed only for those who will in later life be well supplied with ghost writers.

The Lee Wade and Boylston prizes are probably endowed unchangeably by probated wills. As a stimulus to interest in the style of public speaking they have some value, but the prizes would serve to greater purpose if they also encouraged interest in the substance of public speaking. If, instead of an old-fashioned elocution contest, they provided for an equally old-fashioned, but still valuable oratorical contest, they would continue to fulfill the original purpose of their donors. Not only would they encourage public speaking, but they would encourage public thinking, a lost art for which there might well be some reward.