Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/276

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258
A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

candidate, or the candidate's supporters, to point to the merit indications, and to explain or excuse the less favourable or the adverse features of the truth-telling pile. Each candidate stood by this testifying document, waiting the turn and opportunity for an explanatory or justifying address, alike to the judges, and to that vast confronting audience which constituted the ultimate jury of the great trial.

An audience of those times could be vast indeed, for science progress, however far short of our modern attainments, enabled millions of eyes and ears easily to see what was done and hear what was said. Telephones and photophones conveyed the voice clearly to all distances. And again, ever since cross-electric discovery enabled us to fabricate diamond, almost without either cost or trouble, out of any carbonaceous rubbish, sight-glasses of every kind were so marvellously improved, that any extent of audience, far off as well as near, might be attent, alike with eyes as with ears, when far outside of natural sight from the speaker.

By these and other advances of the science of the day, public speaking had become something very different indeed from the old gesticulating and exhausting method of past times up to the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. Immediately in front of any one addressing the public, on any great occasion such as that we now treat of, were arrayed all the paraphernalia of science for conveying the voice clearly far and wide. Then, again, the surrounding reflectory apparatus sent the speaker's reflected self to accompany his voice. It was for him to stand perfectly still within all these scientific surroundings,