of portions which had no relevancy to the purpose in hand, or were of
only a temporary interest and importance. Such omissions have been
indicated, so that the reader need not be misled, while the effort has
been made to so manage the omissions as to maintain a complete logical
connection among the parts which have been put to use. A tempting method
of preserving such a connection is, of course, the insertion of words or
sentences which the speaker might have used, though he did not; but such
a method seemed too dangerous and possibly too misleading, and it has
been carefully avoided. None of the selections contain a word of foreign
matter, with the exception of one of Randolph's speeches and Mr.
Beecher's Liverpool speech, where the matter inserted has been taken
from the only available report, and is not likely to mislead the reader.
For very much the same reason, footnotes have been avoided, and the
speakers have been left to speak for themselves.

Such a process of omission will reveal to any one who undertakes it an
underlying characteristic of our later, as distinguished from our
earlier, oratory. The careful elaboration of the parts, the restraint of
each topic treated to its appropriate part, and the systematic
development of the parts into a symmetrical whole, are as markedly
present in the latter as they are absent in the former. The process of
selection has therefore been progressively more difficult as the
subject-matter has approached contemporary times. In our earlier
orations, the distinction and separate treatment of the parts is so
carefully observed that it has been comparatively an easy task to seize
and appropriate the parts especially desirable. In our later orations,
with some exceptions, there is an evidently decreasing attention to
system. The whole is often a collection of _disjecta membra_ of
arguments, so interdependent that omissions of any sort are exceedingly
dangerous to the meaning of the speaker. To do justice to his meaning,