almost always action.

 

The nature of persuasion is not solely intellectual, but is largely emotional.

It uses every principle of public speaking, and every "form of discourse," to

use a rhetorician's expression, but argument supplemented by special appeal is

its peculiar quality. This we may best see by examining

 

_The Methods of Persuasion_

 

High-minded speakers often seek to move their hearers to action by an appeal to

their highest motives, such as love of liberty. Senator Hoar, in pleading for

action on the Philippine question, used this method:

 

What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and your

sentimentalities? You have wasted nearly six hundred millions of treasure. You

have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives--the flower of our youth. You

have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you

desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are

coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other

thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in

body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the

emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human

dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship

which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of

the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain