Sprague's Speeches: A Collection of After-Dinner Speeches, and Miscellaneous Addresses (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Sprague’s Speeches: A Collection of After-Dinner Speeches, and Miscellaneous Addresses

Some of my friends have in unguarded moments told me that they liked my speeches. Encouraged by these expressions, and actuated by a commercial spirit, I venture to put in book form some of the children of my brain that, having once been born’ and received a name and some little attention from admiring friends, have served no further purpose than to fill dusty pigeonholes in my desk and lumber up nooks and corners of my home and my ofl‘ice, which should be reserved for better things.

Some little experience in marketing books among young men has shown me that there is a demand for every-day speeches, on every-day topics, made by every-day men. Speeches by Pitt, Curran, Webster, Calhoun, Phillips, Beecher, and other men of like caliber, will continue to be a staple in the market for many generations to come; but the speeches of these giants of the rostrum and forum are a little too much for the average young man who wants some suggestions and inspiration in the direction of speech-making.’ Speeches by Hezekiah Smithers, of P0 dunk, Ky., will sell well along side of the great speeches Of Daniel Webster, because Smithers has’ a way of saying things that can be to a certain degree imitated with profit by the common, average man. It is in the belief, somewhat presumptuous perhaps on my part, that I am something of a Smithers myself, that I ofier this book to the public.

These speeches have not had the stamp of approval put upon them by professors of rhetoric, or schools of oratory.

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