"THAT HAVING TONGUES, THEY MAY SPEAK . . ."

Just 120 years ago, in 1817, Ward Nicholas Boylston founded two Boylston Prizes for Elocution in honor of his uncle, Nicholas Boylston, who established the professorship which bears his name today. The awards stipulated a competition open to seniors, Juniors, and Sophomores in good standing in Harvard College, to be decided by finalists in an annual contest. Tonight, well over a century later, ten Harvard undergraduate finalists will do verbal battle in the Music Building for these prizes, and for their more recent counterpart, the Lee Wade Prize, founded in 1915.

In the long interim between 1817 and the present, the art of clocution has declined far below the standard of men like Webster, Clay, Douglas, or Calhoun. In this descent toward mediocrity, the oratory prizes have stood out against the current like rocks in a stream, steadily maintaining their solid basis. They were washed over the blasts of rhetoric, by stultified, memorized arguments, but they remained fixed. Now, nurtured by Professor Packard's courses, and with the tremendous flowering of radio, which is based entirely on ear-appeal rather than the flourishing of arms, the true clocution which the prizes were founded to promote is returning to its rightful prominence. The beetling brow and clenched fist of the ward-heeler are lost on the radio audience; his persuasion must now be based entirely on what the says, not on what he does, and such demands an ability to express ideas in clear spoken English.

Evidence of a healthy public awakening to the lures of improved speech is shown, moreover, by the wide diversity of material which is lending itself to public discussion. As an illustration, the ten students tonight will speak on subjects ranging from "The Supreme Court Tribunal" to "Hector's Farewell to Andromache," and they will speak because they have something important to say, not for mere theatrical arm-waving. Each one chosen for better-than-average mastery of delivery, these ten, in their struggle for the prizes, are raising their voices in the cause for better speaking, furnishing impetus to a regenerated art. The trend towards original writing and simplified delivery at long last seems under way. Given added stimulation of this sort the Prizes will become as popular and as highly esteemed as the donors wanted them to be.