FOR AND AGAINST

Are we approaching new times? Two events have just occurred that seem to me to be quite important.
1° A monument was inaugurated in Besançon and there was not a single speech. The event was moving, solemn, silent and beautiful.

2° The Union of French Charcuterie gave its grand annual banquet the day before yesterday, under the presidency of a high official personality... And there was not a single speech. The ice cream and the champagne passed without the help of the dinner eloquence. However, the guests digested it perfectly. It is even said that they ate with great appetite and drank with great enthusiasm

This is simply a miracle... This is simply unbelievable... On two occasions, and only a few days apart, men were able to assemble without immediately feeling the need to pronounce long sentences, full or empty, long, sonorous or ponderous words... Are men on the point of realizing that they are making an unfortunate abuse of speech and saliva? Would men be ready to recognize that one can show joy or pain without plucking pale flowers of rhetoric and that one can eat beef fillet in common without talking about democracy, the Empire, the Middle Ages or fiduciary inflation? ... That would be a revolution, a capital moral revolution...

We must not be systematically enemies of speech... A speech can sometimes be opportune and even necessary... An orator can be eloquent (anything happens!) and his eloquence can be productive and generative, can animate wills, determine beneficial acts, engender important events. Only we must not abandon ourselves hand and foot to tyrannical speech, to epidemic speech, to overflowing and buzzing speech.... We must, we should use speech with discretion, with moderation. We should guide it and not let ourselves be guided by it...

However, it seems that today we have become the serfs of speech. We can no longer sketch a movement, initiate an action, manifest a feeling without flooding ourselves with floods of eloquence, without talking for hours on end... Speeches!... Speeches!... We are joyful? Speeches! We are afflicted? Speeches! We are celebrating a happy event? Speeches! There has been a catastrophe? Speeches! A boxer returns from America, a gentleman marries his daughter, a farmer has harvested a phenomenal potato, a jockey has received the Agricultural Merit for speeches, speeches, speeches!... Ordinary citizens sometimes think that ministers talk too much, who talk all the time, who are forced to talk all the time... But ordinary citizens, at the slightest opportunity, also rush to discourse, to string words together, to raise their voices and to unroll meters of commonplaces like old pieces of faded and moth-eaten fabric...
Moderation is a great virtue, We must speak moderately

Maurice PRAX