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TJie Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 2 1 3 conquer by force of numbers — the number of words they use. I, the other day, chanced across a curious illustration of this in the diary of my father. Returning from his long residence in England at the time of the Civil War, he attended some ceremonies held in Boston in honor of a public character who had died shortly before. "The eulogy," he wrote, "was good, but altogether too long. There is in all the American style of composition a tendency to dif- fuseness, and the repetition of the same ideas, which materially im- pairs the force of what is said. I see it the more clearly from hav- ing been so long out of the atmosphere." The failing is national ; nor in this respect does the American seem to profit by experience. Take, for instance, the most im- portant of our public documents, the inaugurals of our Presidents. We are a busy people ; yet our newly elected Presidents regu- larly inflict on us small volumes of information, and this, too, not- withstanding the fact that in the long line of inaugural common- places but one utterance stands out in memory, and that one the shortest of all, — the immortal second of Lincoln. Our present chief magistrate found himself unable to do justice to the occasion, in his last annual message, in less than eighteen thousand words ; and in the Congress to which this message was addressed, two senators, in discussing the " paramount " issue of the day, did so, the one in a speech of sixty-five thousand words, the other in a speech of fifty-five thousand. Webster replied to Hayne in thirty- five thousand ; and Webster then did not err on the side of brevity. So in the presidential canvass now in progress. Mr. Bryan accepted his nomination in a comparatively brief speech of nine thousand words ; and this speech was followed by a letter of five thousand, covering omissions because of previous brevity. President McKin- ley, in his turn, then accepted a renomination in a letter of twelve thousand words, — a letter actually terse when compared with his last annual message ; but which Mr. Carl Schurz subsequently pro- ceeded to comment on in a vigorous address of fourteen thousand words. Leviathans in language, we Americans need to be Methu- selahs in years. It was not always so. The contrast is, indeed, noticeable. Washington's first inaugural numbered twenty-three hundred words. Including that now in progress, my memory covers fourteen presidential canvasses ; and by far the most gener- ally applauded and effective letter of acceptance put forth by any candidate during all those canvasses was that of General Grant in 1868. Including address and signature, it was comprised in ex- actly two hundred and thirty words. With a brevity truly com- mendable, even if military, he used one word where his civilian VOL. VI. — 15.