LONG AND SHORT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22628, 20 July 1935, Page 8

LONG AND SHORT

POLITICAL SPEECHES LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG THE RISE OF BUNKUM. In a vain attempt to prevent the passage through the United States Senate of a resolution for the extension of the National Recovery Act, Senator Huey P. Long, of Louisana, spoke for 15i hours and was in such an exhausted condition when he finished that he had to be assisted from the Chamber, says a writer in the Melbourne Age. During this speech Senator Long* wandered far from the subject before the Senate, and introduced a great deal of irrelevant matter. The record for the longest speech in the American Congress is held by Senator La Follette, who in the session of 1908 spoke for 18 hours. It is of interest to note that wo < we the word bunkum, meaning claptrap and humbug, to an American politician who achieved notoriety by his long speeches. Bunkum, which in America has been contracted in recent times to bunk, is a mutilation of the word Buncombe, the name of a county in North Carolina. The representative of Buncombe in the American Congress more than a hundred years ago was Mr Felix Walker, and when debates took place, on what is known as the Missouri Compromise, au agreement between the slavery and antislavery States arising out of the admission of the State of Missouri to the Union as a free-labour State, Mr Walker

delivered long, irrelevant speeches, and when reproved for his loquacity he de-, dared that he was speaking to the electors of Buncombe. GETTYSBURG ADDRESS. It is not by long speeches that public men win lasting fame, but by short ones. The most memorable speech ever delivered in America by a public man consisted of 270 words, and occupied less than three minutes in delivery. This is President Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when portion of the battlefield where the Confederate Army, under General Lee, was defeated by the Federal Army, under General Meade, on July 13, 1803, was dedicated as a soldiers’ cemetery. In this battle 5004 were killed and 27,200 wounded. The dedication of the cemetery took place four months after the battle, while the Civil War was still in progress. Lincoln’s address followed a speech by Edward Everett, which had lasted nearly two hours and had eventually wearied the audience. When Everett, a scholar and statesman, who had achieved a reputation for carefully-pre-pared speeches, sat down, the audience expected Lincoln, as President, to make a lengthy speech. But almost before , they had settled themselves comfort - ably to listen, after relaxing when Everett ceased, Lincoln had finished his speech. The effect on the audience was that of disappointment, and Lincoln subsequently referred to his speech as “a flat failure.” “I tell you.” he said to a Jricnd on his return to Washington, “that speech fell on the audience like a wet blanket. 1 am distressed about it. I ought to have prepared it with more care.” It gave rise to no favourable comment when it appeared in the news-

papers. In fact, it was not until after Lincoln’s death, which took place 18 months later, that people began to regard the speech as one of the gems of the English language. In America the most extravagant praise has been bestowed on it for two generations. At a time when the style of rhetoric practised by statesmen of the Victorian period is sneered at it retains its place in the admiration of the English-speaking world, although it is a conspicuous example of Victorian rhetoric. The late Lord Curzon, in a lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1913, described it as a masterpiece of modern English. THE TEXT. This famous speech was as follows: “ Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who hero gave their lives , that that nation might five. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, wo cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say hero; but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated hero to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far nobly advanced. It is rather

for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion —that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’’’ NOT POSSIBLE. In British Parliaments, speeches of enormous length, such as that delivered by Senator Long, are seldom made. The standing orders of most of the Parliaments in the British Empire empower the Speaker to call a member to order if his remarks wander far from the subject undei discussion, and if he continues to be irrelevant the Speaker can order him to resume his seat. And the member who tries to spin out time by means of a long speech for the purpose of blocking the business of the House can usually be thwarted by a motion that he be no longer heard. Mr Gladstone’s longest speech in the House of Commons was made when introducing one of his Budgets, and lasted five hours. During the present generation this record of five hours has been approached only once in the House of Commons, and on that occasion the House adjourned in the middle of the speech for half an hour to enable the exhausted speaker to get his second wind. This was on April 29, 1909, when Mr Lloyd George. Chancelloi of the Exeliei|iicr, brought in the famous Budget which the House ot lauds subsequently rejected, thereby giving the Liberal Government a new lease of life by enabling it to appeal to the country with a popular cry and opening the way to the

curtailment of the powers of the Houso of Lords by the enactment of legislation depriving it of the power of veto over Bills passed by the House of Commons. A WAR BUDGET. Mr Lloyd George’s Budget speech on this occasion, which was divided into two sections, lasted a little over four hours and a-half. exclusive of the interval. The speech was provocative, and so was the Budget which was directed against the landed and wealthy classes. “This is a war Budget,” declared Mr Lloyd George. “It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step towards the good time when poverty and wretchedness, and the human degradation that always follows in their camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which onct, infested their forests.”

Mr E. T. Raymond, in referring to this lengthy speech in his “ Life of Lloyd George,” wrote; “Much of the speech was occupied with lengthy dissertations (f little relevance to revenue. Indeed, the main fault of the Budget, as seen in afte, years, was its failure as a revenue-nroducing instrument. The speech abounded in promises; it bristled with taunts. It spoke of millions to be wrung from the trade that lived by ‘swilling and tippling’; of other millions to be wrung from the land, of which the House of Lords owned so much.”