How to Have Confidence to Your Speech
A resourceful self-reliance is necessary to complete confidence. Emerson says, “Knowledge is the antidote to fear.” A man must train himself to be equal to any emergency. He should examine himself, thoroughly prepare himself and make up his mind to take the risk of failure if necessary. Successive failures should be an incentive to greater effort. Above all he should do his work under the immediate inspiration of duty. The habit of clear and deliberate utterance should be cultivated both in conversation and public address. He should be bold, but not too bold. More failures in public speaking are due to egotism than to anything else. The first possession of every man should be self-possession, and this can best be acquired through the practise of concentration, modesty of manner, thorough preparation, and physical earnestness.
EXAMPLES
1. What, my lord, shall you tell me, on the passage to the scaffold which that tyranny, of which you are only the intermediate minister, has erected for my murder, that I am accountable for all the blood that has been and will be shed, in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor? Shall you tell me this, and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it? I, who fear not to approach the Omnipotent Judge, to answer for the conduct of my short life,—am I to be appalled here, before a mere remnant of mortality?—by you, too, who, if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have caused to be shed, in your unhallowed ministry, in one great reservoir, your lordship might swim in it!
“On Being Found Guilty ROBERT EMMET.
of High Treason.”
2. With conscience satisfied with the discharge of duty, no consequences can harm you. There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or for our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape their power, nor fly from their presence. They are with us in this life, will be with us at its close, and in that scene of inconceivable solemnity, which lies yet farther onward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded by the consciousness of duty, to pain us whenever it has been violated, and to console us so far as God may have given us grace to perform it.
“The Knapp Murder Trial.” WEBSTER.
3. But this I will avow, that I have scorned,
And still do scorn, to hide my sense of wrong!
Who brands me on the forehead, breaks my sword,
Or lays the bloody scourge upon my back,
Wrongs me not half so much as he who shuts
The gates of honor on me,—turning out
The Roman from his birthright; and, for what?
To fling your offices to every slave!
Vipers, that creep where man disdains to climb,
And, having wound their loathsome track to the top,
Of this huge, mouldering monument of Rome,
Hang hissing at the nobler man below!
“Catiline’s Defiance.” GEORGE CROLY.