This is the text of an article Robert Menzies wrote on the importance of the art of politics.
Sir Robert Menzies at the podium
It was published in the New York Times Magazine on November 28, 1948.
Menzies canvasses the importance of the art of persuasion through oratory and speech-making. Politics, he says, “is both a fine art and an inexact science”. In focussing on the “scientific aspects” of politics, the activities requiring measurement, organisation and planning, it is easy to forget “how to persuade a self-governing people”.