W.E.A. LECTURE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19802, 18 May 1934, Page 10

W.E.A. LECTURE

PUBLIC SPEAKING ADDRESS BY MR A. M. PATERSON At the W.E.A. last night. Mr A. M. Paterson continued his series of talks on public speaking with a paper on "The Preparation of the Speaker.” Mr Paterson said that during the delivery of his address the speaker should be careful not to project himself between his subject and his audience. He should gradually fade from the picture as the earnestness of his appeal increased, and the minds his hearers became filled with his thoughts in place of their own. Half the success of Demosthenes lay in the fact that he threw himself wholeheartedly into his orations, and became lost to the audience he carried away, as much by his enthusiasm for the cause he advocated as by the m«re flow of words. The flow of language together with his passionate earnestness constituted his matchless eloquence. Assuming they had a speaker, what was he to speak about? Politics, or the science of government, being one of the few things men nowadays became serious over, he would most often be called upon to discuss that subject. He would become a politician, but in the proper sense. As students of public speaking, they were to become students of the science of government as well. Mr Paterson cautioned his audience against too hastily identifying themselves with any particular Party, for increased knowledge might cause them to “turn their coat,” when they would be known ever afterwards as political renegades. Both Gladstone and Disraeli made this mistake. Both accepted the political creeds of their fathers without sufficient thought, with the result that Gladstone the Tory, found it imperative to become a Liberal, and Disraeli the Liberal, found it expedient to become a Tory; and during the rest of their lives their opponents twitted them as political turncoats. They were to study politics with the view of formulating a scientific political policy based on the fundamental principle that the liberty of a people consisted in being governed by laws which they had made themselves, and not by laws made by the representatives of vested interests. Science of Politics. "Had the science which you are to import into politics been applied to government fifty years ago, lawmaking would not have lagged so far behind every other form of human activity and we should long ago have abolished war, involuntary poverty, ignorance and hardship; and ihe world would have been a veritable paradise instead of the poachy mixture of heaven and hell, which unscientific minds have made it, said Mr Paterson. “In pursuing your studies, ycu will discover that, in democratic countries the people are roughly divided into two small and active political groups, and a large central mass which bothers little about politics except at election times. You will find also that all political propaganda, slogans and catch-words, are invented expressly to swing a sufficient number of this unthinking mass in support of one political party or another to give it a majority. It will be your business to appeal to this large mass of so called unthinking people and it will be your endeavour to arouse them to do by intelligence what they have been in the habit of doing by necessity, after suffering innumerable calamities and loss.” Such men as Mussolini and Hitler, losing patience with the mass, made themselves its drill instructors; the Communist Party in Russia had made itself the schoolmaster of the Soviet masses, and it might be that, if England remained asleep, Mosely will become dictator of Great Britain and the British Empire. “If we succeed in leavening this mass before a dictatorship is upon us, w'e shall enter a new and a glorious world, in which the sum of human happiness will be increased a hundred fold,” concluded Mr Paterson.”

The speaker was accorded a vote of thanks for his address.