effective means of getting back of what is said in such a manner as to be interesting, convincing and persuasive.

A very common fault is speaking too loud. If the above suggestions are put into practice, disagreeably loud speaking is absolutely unnecessary in order to be heard perfectly in any sized room. The effort to make oneself heard, by force and loudness of voice alone, is certain to cause the pitch to be too high and the quality of the voice very unpleasant. Here lies the most fundamental cause of unnaturalness, artificiality, and monotony in speaking. The declaimer and the ranter always speak in a pitch which is above the heads of the audience. He speaks at his audience, not to them. He leaves the impression of affectation and bombast.

The most agreeable and pleasing voice is always found in the various modulations of the conversational range. The speaker must learn to know and hear his voice in this range and then modulate it according to the size of the room, the number of those addressed, and the degree of earnestness required to adequately express and impress his thoughts and feelings.

Speak to a jury as you would to an individual whom you wished to interest, instruct, convince, and persuade. This requires interesting narration, clear and definite statement, salient and logical argument, earnest and soulful appeal. These are found in the conversational range of voice where the real personality of the speaker is made most manifest. Here is found an unwritten and almost indefinable language of the voice combined with those natural characteristics of expressive conversation which make the most successful speaking a tremendous psychological power. These

are:

(1) Pause, which gives opportunity for the reception of an idea and which

restrains the speaker from speaking too rapidly.

(2) Touch, which indicates where the mind of the speaker is concentrated, and which concentrates the mind of the judge and the jury upon the central point of a clause or sentence.

(3) Change of Pitch, which discriminates idea from idea; which holds attention by introducing variation in the presentation of ideas; and which aids in making each idea as specific as possible.

(4) Inflection, which shows the relation of one idea to another, or the attitude of the speaker towards his ideas, his purpose, or his audience; which reveals a methodic action of the mind leading through many ideas and thoughts to some specific end; which relates every word spoken to the central thought and sustains attention upon the main idea until it is made logically salient.

(5) Tone Color, which indicates feeling. It is the language of imagination, sympathy, tenderness, disdain, irony, sarcasm. It is an unwritten and indefinable eloquence.

(6) Movement, which indicates the estimation of the value the speaker lays upon what he says. The point of view, change in feeling or experience, character, and attitude of mind, are all indicated by various degrees of movement, governed by the rhythmic pulsations of the mind, in thinking.

By careful observing to make use of these fundamental characteristics of good conversational speaking, the common faults of vocalization usually apparent in the address to the jury will be largely eliminated. Then the other elements of a good delivery, gesture and facial expression, will also be acquired much more naturally and easily.

Special attention however should be given to these important means of emphasis and interpretation. Cicero says:

"A speech is well delivered when the vocal expression, the facial expression and the gestural expression are in harmony with the sentiment uttered and in harmony with each other."

Rufus Choate, by following this instruction throughout his life in almost daily practice upon some form of literature, developed into the most expressive and effective jurist America has ever produced.

Gesture does not only mean the manipulation of the arms and hands, but the movement of the body in general from the moment the lawyer appears before the jury until he has finished his speech. Every physical attitude is consciously or unconsciously impressing the judge and the jury, favorably or unfavorably, through their visual sense. The lawyer should conduct himself with such dignity and self-control as to inspire confidence and respect. Carelessness and slovenliness in walking or standing before the jury may be sufficient cause for failure to win a case.

If the speaker is nervous, as is frequently the case with a young lawyer, he must control this by mentally and willfully insisting that it shall not assert itself by vitalizing his legs, arms. and hands, or the muscles of his throat. By exertion of will power this nervousness or fear may be concentrated in the center of the body. The chest will very likely expand under this pressure and the taking of a deep breath, the heart may beat a little faster for a while, but the general bearing of the speaker will indicate self-control. He will have the assurance of mastering himself and this. will greatly aid him in mastering his case and his jury. This control of fear and nervousness is absolutely necessary to an easy and forceful manipulation of the arms and hands in gesture.

Gesture. Generally speaking the ges

tures of the hands in forensic delivery are as follows:

The

(1) The Gesture of Attention. right hand is brought by a movement of the arm from the shoulder to a definite position which reveals the palm of the hand to the jury at the instant the word is vocally emphasized which is the center of attention.

(2) The Gesture of Assertion. From the position of the hand at the conclusion of the gesture of attention, the hand is gradually raised during the utterance of the less important words until the thought center word is emphasized when the hand is brought down with a full arm movement definitely upon the accented syllable of this word with the hand open so as to reveal the palm, the most expressive feature of it, to the jury. These two gestures are usually given together and when accompanied, as they should be, by a concentration of the speaker's eyes and vocalization upon those to whom he is addressing his remarks, result in such a correlation of the elements of expression as to produce a powerful psychological effect in impressing his thought and feeling upon them.

(3) The Gesture of Reference. This may be definite or indefinite. In the gesture of definite reference the eyes should follow the hand as it reaches the thought center. In the gesture of indefinite reference the eyes should not follow the hand to the thought center. In these gestures the hand is raised by a full arm movement during the utterance of the less important words to a position about on a level with the shoulder and in the direction of the thing referred to until the thought center word is vocalized, when the hand is allowed to fall upon it with palm open towards those he is addressing.

(4) The Gesture of Negation. The

hand is raised by a full arm movement with the palm down and in the opposite direction from the thing referred to during the utterance of the less important words until the thought center word of negation is reached, when it is brought to a definite position with the palm down or out towards that to which the speaker is referring..

(5) The Gesture of Generalization. In this gesture both hands may be used. They are brought to position during the utterance of the less important words by a movement from the shoulders, which brings the hands to the emphasized word or thought center simultaneously, with the palms open towards those to whom

the remarks are addressed. The hands should reach their definite position at a point about forty-five degrees below the shoulders and about forty-five degrees to the right and left.

Every lawyer who desires to be most effective before a jury or an audience should persistently practice these simple fundamental gestures with great care and discrimination, until they are thoroughly mastered. If he would be most successful he must instruct and convince and persuade, by that harmonious combination of the elements of expression, which appeals psychologically to the minds and hearts of the jury through their ears and eyes.

NOTHIN

Letter XIV

TOTHING much more annoys me than to see careless and disrespectful manners in the courtroom. To me, the administration of justice seems more sacred than profane. Outside of his religious worship, man in his courts of law, in the honest attempt to do justice, becomes God's minister; for God is justice, and the divine attribute is manifested in the just laws of a modern state as really as they were in the ten fundamental commands of the Mosaic law. Regarded in this light, what dignity and responsibility rest upon the judge! What a noble and worthy duty is the jury's! How solemn a place the courtroom becomes, where all men, regardless of creed or race, may resort for the amelioration of their wrongs and the enforcement of their rights! With what seriousness should our lawmakers inscribe the new and necessary statutes upon the book of laws!

Nothing frivolous or trifling should be permitted in the courtroom. How truly they understood the dignity and significance of court procedure who first made. use of the term "contempt of court"! Men may be and are frequently contemptuous in the presence of a sovereign or ruler; but there is no punishment for

such contempt. A man is contemptuous of his fellowmen; on the street, in the market, in his private relations; even of his parents and his family; yet there is no statutory punishment until his foolish conduct shames the dignity of the place of law or the recognized temple of religion. There are three generations of lawyers behind you, my boy, and it is my pride and pleasure to be able to say that not one of them ever incurred the punishment for contempt of court. In the conduct of a case, your patience and temper will be severely tried. You will see falsehood and deceit gaining over your just cause; the opposing counsel will maliciously pervert the facts and distort the law; he may even turn upon you personally with vile insult or biting sneer; but I hope and pray that your temper may not betray you into descending to similar methods in reply.

Your grandfather's carriage in the courtroom was perfect. He was a great lover of his cigar, yet he would not enter a courtroom, even during the adjournment of court, with a cigar in his mouth or in his hand. I never saw him at any time in a courtroom with his hat The sight of a lawyer at the bar, during the conduct of a case, with cheeks bulging with chewing tobacco and

on.

pausing in his remarks to the judge to spit a copious stream of black juice from his mouth, caused your grandfather unutterable disgust. I have seen the bailiffs reading newspapers; lawyers lolling over two or three chairs, yawning and gaping; even the judge tilted back, half dozing in his chair; yet your grandfather always entered the room and took his seat with a quiet dignity and an attitude that spoke eloquently of his respect for his profession, and for the court. I have heard him say frequently that he could not enter the courtroom without a peculiar feeling that the great and sovereign state itself was present in the room. To him all the toilers in the fields, the mines, the shops, seemed present in spirit; they had set that place apart as their altar of justice; they had deputed their servants to administer their laws there. Quixotic or not, that sense of the immediacy of all the people of our great state made your grandfather a marked man in court, and touched every word he said with sublimity and meaning.

It is an intolerable thing that a gaping rabble should be admitted to the trial of the so-called sensational cases. Creatures of that kind are to us what the lovers of the gladiatorial arena were to the ancient Romans. They come into the courtroom sniffing for blood, and hoping to be amused and regaled by the tears and woes of hapless sufferers. How they lick their foul muzzles when some shrinking woman tells of her ruin and abandonment, or an aged parent confesses the disgrace of his only son! The courts must be open to the public, yet it is a shame and a pity that such a right should be abused by a lot of curious spectators, whose conduct and presence confuse the witnesses, frequently bias the jurors' minds, and destroy the whole solemnity and dignity of a judicial proceeding.

There is no apparent remedy for this, yet it becomes more than ever the imperative duty of every lawyer present to so comport himself with becoming gravity and due regard to the proceedings as to rebuke and correct the attitude of the careless and thoughtless spectators.

TH

Letter XV

HERE is no fixed scale of fees for lawyers. In some places the people have been trained to pay more for their legal advice than in others. This is particularly true of pioneer places. What you may charge $100 for in an Alaskan mining town, you may have to do for $25 on the Pacific coast and $10 back in Pennsylvania.

While I do not like to regard the profession of law as a business merely, I am compelled to admit that the laws of supply and demand govern prices in that sphere of activity as well as in selling shoes or overcoats. The little village in Pennsylvania will have its full quota of lawyers, while in an Alaskan mining camp the lawyer will find himself for once a rare bird, and a gentleman whose services are much sought. With the later settling down of the mining town, however, and the influx of business and professional men, prices of all things, merchandise and professional services alike, will of course sag.

In determining the amount of your fees, you must generally be governed by the prevailing amounts charged. There are exceptional men, who can come into a small-pay community and demand and receive their own scale of prices. To do that successfully you must be an able and experienced lawyer. If you charge $20 more than your neighbor does, you must be prepared to render so much more value than he does.

Remember that absolutely reliable and honest legal advice, the advice upon which a man may act immediately and