experience has been that skillful, technical instruction, as such, is
the one kind of instruction that should always be provided where public
speaking is taught, and the one that the student should not fail to
secure when it is at hand. Other elements in good speech-making may, if
necessary, be obtained from other sources. The teacher of speaking
should teach speech. He should teach something else also, but he
should, as a technician, teach that. The multitude of men and women
who, in earlier and later life, come, in vocal trouble, to seek help
from the experienced teacher, and the abundance of testimony as to the
satisfactory results; the repeated evidences of failure to produce
rightly trained voices wholly by so-called inspirational methods; the
frequent evidences of pernicious vocal results from the forcing of
young voices in the overintense and hasty efforts made in preparing for
prize speaking, acting, and debating,--all these may not come to the
understanding of the ordinary observer; they may not often, perhaps,
come within the experience of the exceptionally gifted individuals who
are usually cited as examples of distinguished success; they cannot
impress themselves on educators who have little or no relation with
this special subject; they naturally come into the knowledge and
experience of the specially trained teacher of public speaking, who is
brought into intimate relations with the subject and deals with all
sorts and conditions of men. Out of this experience comes the strong
conviction that the teacher of public speaking should be a vocal
technician and a vocal physician, able to teach constructively and to
treat correctively, knowing all he can of all that has been taught
before, but teaching only as much of what he knows as is necessary to
any individual.

For the dignity and worth of the teaching, the teacher of speaking
should be trained, and should be a trainer, as has been indirectly