Model Questions for Debate-Preparation of Programs

As explained on page 51 of this book, debating is excellent training for concentrating the mind, directing ideas into a definite channel, and quickening individual thought. As Orison Swett Marden, the editor of Success and author of many excellent books on self-help, has well said, "Nothing is more noticeable during the education of a young man than his rapid growth and improvement when he takes active part in debating and public speaking. No one can afford to neglect any means of self-culture or self-improvement, the lack of which would perhaps embarrass him in the future in any position that he might be called upon to occupy. Supposing young Roosevelt, with stooped shoulders and delicate health, had said to himself, 'What's the use for me to try to cultivate good manners or to practice in a debating society?' It is the privilege of every American to know that the highest position in the world may possibly come to him, and the only sure way to be prepared for that position is to make every occasion a great occasion. To this end there is no accomplishment more practically beneficial to the average man or woman than the ability to think clearly and give definite expression to one's thoughts.

The following programs for debate and discussion, arranged from The Success Club Debater, will serve as excellent models.

"Every program should be arranged symmetrically. There should be a relationship of all parts. Select, first, the leading feature for a foundation to build upon. This may be either a debate or an address. Then construct all the other parts upon this, just as a carpenter builds a house. Be careful, first, that the subject is entertaining and amusing. Second, instructive and thought-generating. Third, that it contains sufficient variety.

"The following subjects and discussions may be modified and changed to suit the conditions of any audience. Each program may be supplemented by musical numbers, recitations, and special pains should be taken to introduce sufficient humor to lighten the heavy subjects."

"Lives of Great Men Oft Remind Us"

A series of programs based upon the example and influence of great American men.

I

1. Introductory Address-The Lasting Influence of a Great Life.
2. Discussion-What Quality in the Character of Washington has Contributed Most to His Fame?
3. Character Sketch-Washington: The Father of the Republic.

II

1. Character Sketch-Franklin: The Dean of Yankee Philosophers.
2. Debate-Resolved: That it is not "Easier to Earn Money than to Spend it Well."
3. Paper-Is there as Great a Chance to Rise in the Printing and Publishing Business Today as There Was in the Time of Franklin?

NOTE.-Probably no club will fail to supplement this program with some number dealing with the Proverbs of Poor Richard.

III

1. Character Sketch-Jefferson: The Founder of the Democratic Ideas.
2. Debate-Resolved: That the Republican Party Today Represents the Democratic Idea of Jefferson Better than Does the Democratic Party.
3. Address-Opportunities in Politics. By a Politician.

IV

1. Character Sketch-Marshall: The Great Expounder of the Constitution.
2. 2. Address-Opportunities in Law. By a Lawyer.
3. 3. Discussion-Should the Constitution be Revised to Meet Modern Conditions?

V

1. Character Sketch-Greeley: The Patriarch of Journalism.
2. Debate-Resolved: That the Press Exerts Greater Influence than the Pulpit.
3. Address-How to Become a Newspaper Man. By a Journalist.

VI

1. Character Sketch-Lincoln: The Preserver of the Republic.
2. Discussion: Should the Negro be Treated as a Social Equal of the White?
3. Paper-Needed Reforms Demanding Great Statesmanship.

VII

1. Character Sketch-Beecher: The Greatest Preacher of His Time.
2. Discussion-Is the Influence of the Pulpit Declining?
3. Address-Opportunities in the Ministry. By a Clergyman.

VIII

1. Character Sketch-Emerson: The Sage of Concord.
2. Discussion-The Best Book I Ever Read.
3. Address-How to Become a Writer.

IX

1. Character Sketch-Grant: Our Greatest Soldier.
2. Debate-Resolved: That War Is Unnecessary, and that all Disputes Should Be Settled by Arbitration.
3. Paper-How to Enter West Point or Annapolis.

X

1. Character Sketch-Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park.
2. Discussion-What Has Been the most Beneficial Invention of the Past Twenty Years?
3. Paper-Some Things that are still to be Invented.

Stepping Stones to Commercial Success

A series of programs for clubs whose membership is composed largely of men and women engaged in commercial callings.

I

1. Introductory Address-What is Commercial Success?By a commercial teacher or a business man.
2. Debate-Resolved: That there are Fewer Opportunities for One to Rise in Commercial Life Today than there were Fifty Years Ago.
3. Paper-Don't Wait for Your Opportunity; Make It!

II

1. Talk-How to Get, and Keep, a Situation.By an employe who has done both.
2. Discussion-Is Influence Stronger than Ability in Securing Promotion?
3. Contest-Each member writes an application for a certain position. A prize to be awarded to the one voted the best.

III

1. Address or Paper-Master the Details of Your Work.
2. Reading-Aids to Business System, Selections from "System" and other commercial journals.
3. Discussion-What Modern Invention Has Been the Greatest Aid to Commercial Interests; i. e., Telephone, Typewriter, Eelevator, etc.

IV

1. Talk-Honesty as a Policy and as a Principle.
2. Debate-Resolved: That Intense Competition Has Been the Greatest Cause of the Decline in the Standard of Business Integrity.
3. Quotation Contest-Every member hands in a quotation relating to honesty. These are read aloud and vote taken as to which is best. The collection of quotations may be given as a prize.

V

1. Talk or Paper-Sociability as a Success-Winning Ability.
2. Progressive Talk-Each member is given a card on which ten or more subjects for conversation are named. In the way usual in progressive games, each subject is discussed for three minutes. No two members talk together more than once. When all subjects have been discussed, each member writes on the back of his card his vote as to which is the best conversationalist.
3. Opinions-What Is the most Important of the Qualities of a True Gentleman? Why?

VI

1. Address-Health as Your Capital.By a Physician.
2. Debate-Resolved: That the Growing Interest in Athletics Has Done More for the Cause of Good Health than any other Influence of the past Fifty Years.
3. Paper-Notable Examples of Invalids who Have Succeeded in Spite of their Handicap.

VII

1. Address-Tact Versus Talent.
2. Examples-Each member gives one Example, personal or otherwise, where tact was used advantageously.
3. Story-Conquered by Common Sense. The members should submit original stories suggested by this title. The best ones to be read to the club.

VIII

1. Talk-Starting a Savings Bank Account.By a Banker
2. Debate-Resolved : That Economy is a Greater Advantage to Commercial Success than Energy.
3. Contest-A month previous to the time when this program is rendered the members should each have received a certain sum to invest. Their accounts of the result of their investment should form this number.

IX

1. Address-Commercialism in Politics.By a Politician.
2. Discussion--Is It the Duty of Every Man to Participate in Politics Further than Voting?
3. Paper-Some Things that Every Man Should Know about his Country.

X

1. Address-Little Things that Keep Employes Down.
2. Symposium-Intemperance, Cigarettes, Unsteadiness, Untidiness, Inaccuracy, etc.
3. Reading-Chapter on "Be Brief," from "Pushing to the Front."

An Evening With Shakespeare

1. Address-Who He Was. When and Where He Lived.Parents. Station in Life. Friends. (See page 58.)
2. Symposium-Quotations from Plays.
3. Readings and Impersonations by Members.

Memory

The Lecture accentuates the idea that Memory is not only the basis of personal existence here, but insofar as we may judge the only possible basis of individual immortality. That it was a part of the final mystery at Elusis and formed a part of the doctrine communicated to the initiated at the Elusinian mysteries, proving, the persistence of personality after death and the assurance felt by most religious thinkers that the individual soul will not lose the memory or the affections of its earthly life. Also giving instances of Ancestral Memory, Dual Memory, Multiple Personality, etc.

Memory is the basis of all knowledge, knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of others, knowledge of personal continuity. Man is in a great degree Memory. Destroy Memory and all personal identity is lost and we would be strangers in the world in which we live. The Psalmist attributed memory to the Almighty when he said, "In everlasting remembrance shall the righteous be held;" that is, the good are to live forever in the memory of God. Thus the Creator has endowed man with His own faculty, memory, which is a striking intimation, a foreshadowing of immortality. So memory becomes not only the basis of personal existence here, but insofar as we may judge, the only possible basis of individual immortality. The Greeks did right in making memory the mother of the Muses. By memory we not only live in the present, but also in the past. It is not only the book of reminiscence, but also the suggester of hope and expectation. It refreshes like the refrain of an old song or terrorizes like the remorse of a Macbeth.

When the poet Moore sang "Oft in the stilly night," we know that his recollections must have been pleasant ones-a life well spent, which enabled him to behold scenes long vanished, forms that for years had ceased to be corporeal, to hear sweet voices long ago resolved into the primeval silence. Let us listen to him for a moment as he recalls the past:

Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light, Of other days around me. The smiles, the tears of boyhood's years , The words of love then spoken, The eyes that shone, now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts unbroken, Thus in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light, Of other days around me.

Thus every individual has a memory and in its magic mirror we can recall the days, the scenes of long ago and also suggest hope and expectation of happiness for the days to come.

But we must invoke these powers, we must cultivate this faculty, we must turn aside for a few minutes daily from our insistent environment long enough to obtain a glimpse of these beautiful pictures that hang on memory's wall. When we have learned that there is no real necessity for a dependence upon an external stimulus to awaken a desired state, but that once experienced, we have the power of reproducing it within ourselves through memory, we will have advanced one more step in the masterly realization of ourselves. This power may be cultivated or it may be discouraged-it may become an embellisher of life and an impetus to hope and success.

Let me ask you for a moment to go back with me long enough to glance at some of the many pictures that dwell in the halls of memory. To do so, I will ask your consideration while I recall the familiar poem "Twenty Years Ago." Let us go back with the poet to the scenes of our youth; let us feel once more the sweep of the wind across the hills; let us recall the old school house, the faces of old friends long since departed-let us live it all over again for the moment.

Commonplace, yes, but it is this commonplace faculty which, when raised to vivid intensity becomes the power of the artist, the poet, the business man, the genius, and we miss all these because we allow the insistent facts of the present to usurp our whole attention and never yield to this renewal of memory and deeper consciousness. Dreams, perhaps, but such dreams as contribute to happiness. Impractical! No. If properly used they will incite us to renewed activity and thus enable us to conserve and reclaim all our wasted and neglected possibilities.

A gentleman recently took his aged mother back to her early home where she had lived until six years of age, and which she then for the first time visited after an interval of seventy-seven years. He described their journey to the little village among the hills, the first glimpse of the old church, the school house, the entering of the old home, and all the many associations of her past life came back to her vividly and swiftly and these were emotions of pleasure, and it seemed to her a hallowed day. As to the son, he said it incited him to renewed courage to press on in his life's work.

To those who have forgotten I would say, that it is possible to train the memory to recall scenes of the past, by reviewing some vital experience of one year ago, then two years ago, and so continue concentrating the mind daily for a short time on some important event of every year. By concentrating the mind in this way you will be startled into a sense of the power of your mind. The past will pass in review before you like a beautiful dream, and you will know that you are related to all the past as well as the future, and that every thought and act that has entered your life has been indelibly stamped on your inmost consciousness, you will also know that you are likewise shaping your future.

There is a certain function in the brain of every individual which is called inspirational. We have all felt its influence. Genius and imagination does not apply merely to the poet or professional man, but to every class of humanity, so whenever a thought of unusual value occurs to your mind, immediately write it down, as when recalled it stimulates the mind to create more thoughts of the same character.

THE UNREMEMBERED FRAGMENTS OF A LOST MEMORY.BY FLORENCE WILKINSON.

Where have they gone, the unremembered things,
The hours, the faces,
The trumpet-call, the wild boughs of white spring? Would I might pluck you from forbidden spaces, All ye, the vanished tenants of my places!
Stay but one moment, speak that I may hear,
Swift passer-by!
The wind of your strange garments in my ear Catches the heart like a beloved cry From lips, alas, forgotten utterly.
An odor haunts, a color in the mesh,
A step that mounts the stair; Come to me, I would touch your living flesh- Look how they disappear, ah, where, ah, where? Because I name them not, deaf to my prayer.
If I could only call them as I used,
Each by his name!
Thai violin-what ancient voice that mused! Yon is the hill, I see the beacon flame. My feet have found the road where once I came. Quick-but again the dark, darkness and shame. -Reprinted by permission of McClure's Magazine.

Memory may also become a judgment upon life, from the accusing aspect of which men have ever sought to escape-a book of experience from which they would fain pluck some leaves.

Macbeth at the close of his bloody career implores his physician to give him some antidote to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. He says, "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ?" but the physician answers, "No, therein the patient must minister to himself." And memory to Lady Macbeth after the murder of the good King Duncan became an avenging nemesis and gave her no rest, but compelled her sleeping body to reenact again and again all the details of that horrible deed. In her soliloquy she confuses the varied actions of that dreadful night and her disordered mind jumps from one scene to another, but always memory recalled the blood upon the hand, the signal of the bell calling them to the deed, the darkness of the night, the howling of the tempest, the cowardice of Macbeth, the awful picture of the murdered Duncan. Memory brought back to her the smell of the blood, which all the perfumes of Arabia could not efface; the knocking at the gate; memory recalled every detail of the bloody deed and made her repeat it over and over again, as soon as she fell asleep until at last nature gave way and the unhappy Queen passed into the slumber of death. In the dead of night we see her wandering through the ghost-haunted castle and hear her plead, "Out, out, damned spot."

But we not only have a memory which links the past, the present and the future in its magic web-but in many cases we have chains of memories, multiple personalities, some of them at variance with each other. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was not a figment of Robert Louis Stevenson's imagination, as many think, but one of the real problems of dual personality the doctors meet in the hospitals every day.

A recent case of multiple personality that has been puzzling the scientific world, was reported in The Ladies' Home Journal of recent date, of a young woman who developed four distinct chains of memory. These memories were directly opposite to each other. In one chain the young woman was truthful, modest, religious and everything to be desired, in the second chain she was deceitful, lying, exactly opposite to the first personality. By careful training covering many months the good memory was made the dominant one, and the opposite memory obliterated. Thus it will be seen that slowly, very slowly, do we emerge from the dominance of primitive ideas, primitive memories.

When we stop to think that memory has been with us from the beginning, that it was a faculty of the first invisible, primal protoplasmic cell in its upward sweep of life, expressing itself first in the articulate, and successively through fishes to reptiles, from reptiles to birds, from birds to mammals, and finally, to the apex and climax of all these forms and forces, into the body and soul of man. Thus man has become a microcosm of the universe, a compendium of all animated nature and akin to all forms of life. We have lived the life of all savage men, we have trod the forest's silent depths, and in the desperate game of life and death, matched our thought against the instinct of the beast. We have lived all lives, and through our blood and brain has crept the memory of the shadow and chill of every death.

The poet epitomizes and visualizes the whole scene for us in the following stanza:
A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell, A jellyfish and a saurian,
caves where the cavemen dwell;

Then a memory of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod-
Some call it Evolution, And others call it God.

It will readily be noted that memory is a racial experience conserved and handed down from generation to generation and can be traced back to the simplest forms of organic life, both in animal and plant. Thus memory is a continuous process and the whole series of organic life is a continuous process, a reproduction of what belonged to the first organic forms. Life is reproduction and reproduction is nothing else than memory.

Darwin has truly said that growth and evolution are mere forms of habit and memory, and the passage of an organism through the same stages of growth as its ancestors, is due to something in the germ cells transmitted from parent to child, something akin to memory in the individual.

It is a very wonderful fact that as the cell develops into the perfect organism, it passes through a series of changes which are believed to represent the successive forms through which its ancestors passed in the process of evolution. This is precisely paralleled by our own experience of memory, for it often happens that we cannot reproduce the last learned verse of a poem without repeating the former part. Each verse is suggested by the previous one, and acts as a stimulus for the next. So between the me of today and the me of yesterday, lies night and sleep, an abyss of unconsciousness, nor is there any bridge but memory by which to span the chasm, and the abyss between two generations is bridged by the unconscious memory that resides in the germ cells.

As we rise in the scale of life, the memory cells in the brain increase, and does not this slowly developing mental power correspond to the evolution of mind in the race? It gives us great encouragement for the possibilities of the increase of memory in middle He, owing to the development of portions of the brain we have hitherto unused. This subject is full of the greatest encouragement to mankind.

Shakespeare has written, "that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." But it would take no great stretch of imagination to paraphrase these wonderful words of the great dramatist and say, "we are such stuff as memory is made of," and there are organs of the soul as well as of the body, which recall much of our racial experience since and before the first cell divided. This line of reasoning naturally leads us up to the most interesting subject of ancestral memory, that strange sensation which many have experienced of remembering some scene they have just set their eyes upon. The poet well expresses this feeling:

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell; I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet, keen smell.
The sighing sound, the lights along the shore You have been mine before,
How long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow's soar,
Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall-I knew it all of yore.
Bayard Taylor, in his "Poet's Journal," gives his experience:
Departed suns their trails of splendor drew Across departed summers. Whispers came From voices, long ago resolved again Into the primeval silence, and we twain, Ghosts of our present self, yet still the same, As in a spectral mirror wandered there.
Wordsworth in his "Intimations of Immortality:"
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

Among the many instances of Ancestral memory, I will only recount the experience of a reverend gentleman, who on his first visit to Rome suddenly found the whole place as familiar to him as his own parish, and he found himself struggling with a torrent of words describing what it was like in the older days. He acted as guide and historian to a party of friends who concluded that he had made a special study of the place and neighborhood. He piloted them through the dark underground windings of the catacombs, telling them what to expect and verifying the same as they went along. He led the way feeling certain that he knew it and adds that there was the feeling that he had been there before and had worn armor. This is but one case of thousands. That the subconscious self should be more strongly developed in some persons than in others need not create surprise, for even before birth the development and retention of subconscious impressions in the mind of the child has begun and so the foundation is laid for the development of his mental nature. These early impressions of which no one seems to be conscious, least of all the child, gather up powers as the rolling avalanche and collect" for future emotions, moods, acts, that make up a greater part of the history of the individual and of states more effective and significant than those that are written down in history, or that can be discovered in archives, however secret.

Perhaps that was not wholly a dream of De Quincey, Swedenborg and Coleridge that the angels would come in the judgment day and take a complete record of our lives from the traces left in our body and nervous system and by these we should be judged.

But as Emerson has well said, "This mysterious power that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions."

Joseph Jefferson was one day introduced to General Grant, an event which naturally would have impressed him very strongly. A few hours later he got into the elevator of the hotel at which they were both staying. A short, heavy-set man also entered, bowed to Jefferson and made some off-hand remark. "I beg your pardon," said the actor, "your face is familiar, but I can't recall your name." "Grant," said the stranger, laconically. In telling the story, Jefferson said: "I got off at the next floor for fear I should ask him if he had ever been in the war."

Jefferson also tells the following story on himself: He once went to a post office in a small town where he was unknown and asked if there was any mail for him. "What name, sir?" asked the clerk. "My name ? Oh! Yes, of course. Why I play "Rip Van Winkle, you know." "Joe Jefferson," said the astonished clerk. "Yes, Jefferson; many thanks," the actor answered, as he received his mail and bowed himself out.

There is in persons of every age a foreshortening of memory which may be emphasized somewhat in the case of elderly people. Even Mr. Ruskin, in his later years, thought that the English winter had degenerated from what it was in his youth. And James Whitcomb Riley, in his "Old Man's Nursery Rhymes," echoes the same thought, when he says:
In the Jolly Winter of the long ago- It was not so cold as now- Oh, no! No! No!
Then, as I remember-
Snow balls to eat- Were as good as apples now,
And every bit as sweet."

The oldest inhabitant who thinks the winters are changing, has forgotten that when he was a boy he used to have to get up to make the fire, the stove ice-cold, the fire mighty hard to start -now he uses steam heat. When a boy he used to go out in the early morning, hands stiff with cold to feed the stock-now he sits in his warm office and watches the stock by means of a ticker.

Prof. Swing, the late great preacher and writer of Chicago, once eloquently wrote: "With a sigh we look back toward the studies we once pursued with such zeal and to the books whose pages once brought such a high pleasure, and say: I have forgotten them. At times comes the feeling that our memory is not a good one. It is that tub full of holes which one of the condemned in the classic inferno was compelled to keep stocked with water forever. This poor soul was ordained to carry water just such a distance and in just such a size of bucket as would make it impossible for him to get ahead in his task. The two facts-'holes' and 'forever' must have made his sojourn in hell miserable enough. A heart-sinking not wholly indifferent comes at times to all readers and students who acquire and forget, are thrilled and then forget, weep and then forget the words which drew tears, laugh and then cannot remember what it was which gave such merriment.

"Unable to retain in memory the thoughts of the great books of the world it would be well to memorize some one verse of each poet and some one paragraph of each great prose-writer who has deeply impressed us. The first ten lines of Scott's Lady of the Lake will be able at all times to call up the poem and to represent its pictures; a stanza from Gray's 'Elegy' will recall the dignified and pensive movement of the poetry and the thought; the entire merit of the 'Old Wooden Bucket' comes back when we can recite a few consecutive lines. A mind well stored with these specimens has all his old favorites still within reach. A few links stand for the long chain."

"Passages of Scripture, poems and fine passages of prose when carefully memorized furnish the mind with materials, create a literary taste, give ease and facility of speech and wealth and beauty of expression. The careful memorizer sees shades of meaning and a harmony of the whole which escapes the careless reader. It is far from true that in proportion as one attends to the form of the poem, he loses the thought. The philosophy of Greece developed at the same time as the accurate, elegant and finished language in which it was clothed. The mechanical memory may be said to constitute the basis of the intellectual life. Most words are crystallized history. The word father suggests to the child its parent; to the patriot, Washington; to the devout Christian, God. God is associated in our minds with a mood, and the idea of God as pure thought in the mind may do for an abstraction of science or philosophy, but we have always been accustomed to pay reverence or bow the head when that name is mentioned." In this manner a feeling of reverence is awakened through a train of associations as we pronounce the name. It is a wonderful fact that words retain a power when used in poetry, which they lose when used in abstract thought or in systems of theology.

Tennyson has given us a beautiful illustration of this great idea in one of his minor poems. This poem would have a beauty of its own even if we never appreciated the underlying thought of association which is introduced by the poet:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are root and all,
I should know what God and man is.

While the power of these lines lies in the memory which it recalls, and the words and rhythm are perfect, there is a picture thrown before our attention with the suggestion of a sublime thought back of it that awakens our deepest and most profound feelings. The poem exerts its power by the same old effect of association and not only uses memory, but implies an idea. The idea implied is that nature has a million living forms that are all related-all but parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is and God the soul. There is a thread that links them all together. Every grass, every weed, every flower and every tree, from the humblest moss to the most splendid lily or rose, are members of one family, the flora of the world. There are points of similarity and difference.

To the man of memory, of imagination, "the world is really a great Odyssey, a vision of strange colored oceans and strange shaped trees. In this century, God still walks in the Garden in the cool of the day and every bush is aflame with his presence. The birth of every child, the ever recurring sunrise and sunset is a miracle too great for our comprehension."

The man of memory, imagination, having seen a leaf, a drop of water, can in his mind's eye, recreate all the forests, the rivers and the seas of this great globe of ours-in his presence the mists rise, the clouds form and float in the blue ether, and again return to mother earth in drops of rain: "Complaining brooks make the meadows green, rivers roll in majesty to the soundless seas, and poured round all is old ocean's gray and melancholy waste."

The man of memory, of imagination has a stage within his brain whereon is set all the scenes that lie between the morn of laughter and the night of tears and where the players body forth the false, the true, the careless shallows and the tragic deeps of human life. Upon this stage, all the characters of the immortal Shakespeare live again and reenact their parts. The infant mewling and puking in his nurse's arms, the whining school-boy, the woeful lover, the soldier full of strange oaths, the justice full of wise saws and modern instances, the lean and slippered pantaloon, all ages and conditions of men. We stand upon the forum at Rome and there passes before us in our mind's eye, the mighty Caesar, the luxurious Antony, the lean and hungry Cassius, the Noble Brutus. We hear the shrill warning of the aged soothsayer: "Beware the Ides of March, Beware!" and the hoarse murmurs of the surging populace, "Caesar, Caesar," all as pictured by the immortal Shakespeare.

The soliloquies of Hamlet still people the brain with dreams. The heaths of Scotland are forever associated with Macbeth and the weird sisters. King Lear has for all time immortalized the early history of Britain. The very name of Othello has become a synonym for love and jealousy. The melancholy Jacques still haunts the forest of Arden. Rosalind's laugh yet reechoes through its bosky coverts. Touchstone's wit is as nimble as his legs and the rustic Audrey ever trips over the greensward at his bidding. The Rialto still echoes to the stealthy tread of an implacable Shylock and Portia's plea for mercy will be uttered by lips as yet unborn. In the noon of a midsummer's night we behold Titania and her fairy train flying between the moon and earth lulled by the mermaid's song upon the yellow sands.

The man of memory has lived the life of all people of every race, and has listened to the eager eloquence of the great orators, has sat upon the cliffs with the tragic poets-Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare-and listened to the multitudinous laughter of the sea. Was present in the groves of Athens when Socrates thrust the spear of question through the shield of falsehood. Saw that sublime man when he drank the deadly hemlock and met the night of death as tranquil as a star fades before the light of morning. Has watched Phidias as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of love and awe and beauty-has lived by the slow and sluggish Nile amid the vast and monstrous monuments of the dead and gone Pharaohs. Has seen Cleopatra's barge" move slowly and stately by, silvered in the Egyptian moonlight. Has interpreted the very form and features of the mighty Sphynx and disclosed the heart of her voiceless mystery. Has heard great Memnon's morning song, has lain down with the embalmed dead and felt within their perfumed dust the promise of the resurrection and the life.
In conclusion, I may say, that it is almost impossible for us to overvalue the importance of a good memory. Not only is it of advantage in our every-day life, business, professional, or otherwise, not only is it the basis of our personal existence here, but also a foreshadowing, a strong intimation of immortality. The persistence of memory hereafter as a faculty of the soul, is taught in all religions-it was handed down from Egypt to Greece, and at Elusis formed a part of the doctrine communicated to the initiated at the Elusinian mysteries.

This is of importance, as a source to which may be traced certain aspects of our modern belief in the persistence of immortality after death, and the assurance felt by most scientific and religious thinkers that the individual soul will not lose the memory or the affections of its earthly life.

The belief is most strikingly illustrated in the following poem, by Henry Newbolt, entitled "The Final Mystery at Elusis." The poem represents the initiate in the Elusinian mysteries as receiving his last admonition before death. He is solemnly charged, though trembling with dread and parched with thirst more fierce than fire, not to drink of the waters of that shadowy pool, that means oblivion, the waters of Lethe that rob him of memory, but to think of the diviner stream from which his life was fed, to flee unto the hills and drink of the living waters of memory, and so to be as the Father, immortal, blest in remembered friends and reigning forever.
Hear now, O Soul, the last command of all- When thou hast left thine every mortal mark,

And by the road that lies beyond recall Won through the desert of the burning dark,
Thou shalt behold within a garden bright
A well, beside a cypress ivory-white.
Still is that well, and in its waters cool
White, white and windless sleeps that cypress-tree; Who drinks but once from out her shadowy pool
Shall thirst no more to all eternity. Forgetting all, by all forgotten clean, His soul shall be with that which hath not been.
But thou, tho' thou be trembling with thy dread, And parched with thy desire more fierce than flame,
Tfcink on the stream wherefrom thy life was fed, And that diviner fountain whence it came.
Turn thee and cry-behold it is not far-
Unto the hills where living waters are.
"Lord, tho' I lived on Earth, the child of Earth,
Yet was I fathered by the starry sky. Thou knowest I came not of the shadows' birth,
Let me not die the death that shadows die. Give me to drink of the sweet spring that leaps From Memory's fount, wherein no cypress sleeps."
Then shalt thou drink, O Soul, and therewith slake The immortal longing of thy mortal thirst;
So of thy Father's life shalt thou partake, And be forever that thou wert at first.
Lost in remembered loves, yet thou more thou
With them shalt reign in never-ending Now.
-The Spectator(London).