of muscular, kinesthetic images that will operate automatically to bring the body and the limbs into the right place and movement at the right time. The object of the study of gesture is, not to make one conspicuous, but to make it possible to use the arms and hands unconsciously for the carrying of meanings and consequently for the enrichment of thought. Habit, which produces automatic action, is, for most students, their only salvation. So the ultimate advice as to action and movement of all kinds is, Get the habit.

VI

THE VOICE IN SPEECH

We have seen that the beginnings of communication lie in a command of the whole body; that general bodily alertness affects the alertness of the mind; that freedom of body is fundamental to freedom of the machinery of thinking; that the body carries countless messages in speech to the eye of the observer which he reads almost instantly and with great clearness; and that effective speech is much dependent upon the competency with which a speaker controls his whole body and its several parts in posture, movement, and gesture. Also we have seen that after body comes voice in the line from the listener to the speaker's inner meaning: bodily action, voice, words, meaning.

VOICE AND MEANING

Voice a Matter of Sound Waves.-All the voice can possibly do in carrying meaning is to furnish sound waves. These, when of the right kind, stir up meanings in the listener. This is carrying thought by voice. If we look for a something beyond or above this, we do not find it. The meaning is the subtle, mystic, inner thing; and that always is in the mind of the speaker with a counterpart in the mind of the listener. Voices that stir no reactions in a listener, as when using an unknown tongue, stir no meaning, do not carry thought.

What the voice does must have significance-must have meaning for the listener.

Voice a Measure of Social Adaptability.-In a world that relies upon the voice for putting ideas into circulation, the competence of any man's vocal apparatus determines how much he shall pass on to others by means of speech. It might even be thought of as the neck of his mental bottle; no matter how much is inside, no more can come out than the neck of the bottle will accommodate. It matters not how much a man may know, how wise he may be, how learned, how well able to frame ideas into captivating written composition, he will find, when he speaks, that no more of this can come forth than the neck of his speech-bottle will allow to pass. The rest must stay locked up inside, to a large extent of no use to his fellow-man.

A mind that cannot find an outlet is in a prison. So where speaking is needed, but where no adequate mastery of voice is had, the narrow outlet blocks the mind and imprisons it. All the learning possible to man, or wisdom, or loftiness of sentiment, will be of use to only its holder if he cannot find a way of sending it out into the channels of mental commerce. Men with narrownecked-voice outlets frequently write well and so are not entirely a dead loss to civilization, but they are a total loss as speakers.

Defective Voices Belie Their Owners.-But this stoppage of the passage of thought has even more serious consequences; a faulty voice makes deceivers of men who are at heart genuinely honest. The problem of being personally honest does not stop with merely having honest purposes; a man's reputation for honesty hangs infallibly at the mercy of his ability to tell the truth as he sees it and to compel others to receive it as he intends it. Consequently the most honest man in the world may continually give forth falsehoods through a

voice that belies his meanings and perverts the significance of his words.

The voice is the common carrier of the most delicate of thought commodities. Or, viewed from the reverse side, meanings of the deepest significance can be carried by the most delicate of vocal qualities and inflections. We are told that in a certain Chinese dialect the spoken word for "king" has the same form as the word for "goose," the only difference being in the inflection. And the story is related of an American who, wishing to address the king in the most respectful of tones, succeeded only in calling him a goose. Similar instances by the thousands can be found, and without resorting to men struggling with a foreign tongue; they are common enough in every-day life. A man deeply in earnest often speaks, for all his earnestness, perchance as if he were bored or tired or greatly frightened; and the listener never finds the real truth. Men trying to be polite are common enough who growl, bellow, or sneer. Women desiring to be frank and sincere simper, twitter, or merely use the saccharine tones of social deception. All these tell untruths as unfair to their real intentions as if they had falsified deliberately.

Ostracism from Defective Voices.-Not only does the voice deceive, but it often subjects its owner to unnecessary ostracism from the world's best delights. A canary would rather be among its own kind than among crows, yet many a person of really fine sensibilities is shut out of good company by a voice that makes people turn away. It is not enough to assume that a man's voice is always the true index of his character; such is far from the case. Great souls have been locked in by obstruct-ing voices. But a bad voice brings its sorry wounds to character; for just as a freakish way of wearing clothes or hair, or precisely as a disfigurement of the face or head will in time affect a man's character by affecting

the way people act toward him and receive him in society, so will a defective or freakish voice leave upon the character of its wearer the marks of punishment inflicted upon it by the shocks and cruelties of a misunderstanding society around him. The voice goes a long way toward deciding what kind of people will accept its owner in their company. And ostracism makes terrific inroads upon disposition and character.

DELICACY OF VOCAL EFFECTS

Vocal Competency a Matter of Delicate Mastery.—Only the very dull miss fine inflections. Meanings are more likely to hinge on delicate differences than upon those that are gross. Animals reveal this. A dog can discover to an exceedingly fine measure the slightest changes in his master's temper. The Elberfeld horses, which could perform such prodigies of learning and reasoning, were finally shown to be merely following cues from their master given so slightly and unsuspectingly that the ordinary human could not detect their existence. Some of these cues came from bodily action, but others came from the voice. Man is at least equal to the animal in this faculty, undoubtedly better. Like the animal, he gets his meanings in a subconscious way. The word "come" can be uttered so as to mean, "Come, and welcome"; or, "Come, if you must"; or, “Come, who cares!" or, "Come, though I wish you would stay away"; or, "Go, and never come back," and many other meanings fully as definite. The reactions to such tones of voice need be no more consciously made than in the case of the horses, even when the shades of meaning are most definite.

The Voice a Delicate Mechanism.-This delicacy of shading possible in the voice is the direct outgrowth of the extreme fineness of its mechanism. Not in the