Susan B. Anthony: it was we, the people
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Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester in November 1872 and was arrested two weeks later. Before her trial she gave this speech in town after town across Monroe County, so that no juror could claim not to know her argument. She read the preamble of the Constitution aloud and asked who the words we the people included. The court fined her one hundred dollars, and she never paid it.
Where this text comes fromThe whole argument is made by repetition and subtraction. The phrase we the people is stated, then narrowed to exclude one group, then narrowed again, and each narrowing is offered as something the audience is supposed to reject on hearing it. By the end the original phrase has been defined by everything it does not say. This is a courtroom argument built for people standing in a hall, which is where it was delivered, town after town, before any jury heard it.
What you might not noticeFour semicolons appear in two sentences, each one separating a version of the same phrase from the next, so the punctuation itself performs the narrowing the argument describes. Source
What it trainsFour semicolons in 318 characters, and every one of them arrives after the same opening words, so the passage repeats a phrase four times with a semicolon between each repetition, and on the US layout that mark needs no Shift at all. That combination is unusually awkward: the hand learns the phrase quickly and then has to interrupt it. Eight commas complete the load. Only three capitals appear, one of them inside a sentence, which for a political speech is remarkably few.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1873, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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