All records for—convention oratory must been broken at San Francisco, says the "New York Times." "There never can have been before so many _nominatin; speeches, following each other i linked sweetness long drawn out. It was a veritable Marathon race of the orators, The American appetite for that sort of thing is supposed to be Gargantuan. but it surely was surfeited this time. The delegates rested themselves now and then by marching about and shouting for different candidates. And"tt was noticeable that the speaker who got most applause was the one who threw away his pre pared speech and uttered only five Sentences, thus, like the poet, dying with all his music in him.
Such excesses of convention oratory tend to make the public doubt the necessity and the effectiveness of the nominating sneach. Tt is a theme which the political rhetoricians have carefully studied. Shall the proposer blurt out the name of his candidate atthe _beginning? Senator Conkling did so when he presented Grant in 1880. Or shall the speaker studiously Keep unnamed and mysterious the man whom every delegate knows he is going to advocate and work up to mention of him in a breathless climax which every hearer had long foreseen?
Nice debate about the technique of the nominating speech becomes as futile as the speeches themselves, when there are forty or fifty of them putting a score of men in nomination. In spite of all the disappointments and disillusionments. however. hone will doubtless go on springing eternal in the American breast when a fellow-countryman assembles himself in convention and rises to make a few remarks. It is only after he has spoken that the Milton is found to be inglorious, and the wish is formed that he had also been mute. a case in the newspapers before it comes before the Court, M. Thévenet and M. Alphaud have made contradictory statements, though both agree as to & project for the foundation of this new journal. M. Thévendt declares that such war profits as he made were made out of sales to the Allies, and that in the enterprises he undertook on behalf of France he suffered a loss of Fr. 10,000,000. He maintains, moreover, that the sum of Fr. 150,000,000 which is made out as his profit is simply the sum total of The anti-Thévenét party maintain that M. Thévenét, who is now 37, was an embusqué, and that his escape from military service raised him from a practically humble position to that of a multi-millionaire. Additional piquancy is lent to the preliminaries of the case by a statement that a loan made by M. Thévendt was responsible for the resignation of M. Capus from the "Figaro."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.