In Victorian England, in the House of Commons it was ordinary for political leaders to make four-hour speeches, laying out detailed arguments for legislation.

I’m not going to quote the upholstered grandiloquence. You can easily imagine it; meanwhile, I want to discourage a misimpression that my point is about standards of grammatical usage.

What interests me is not the form but the content: that it was seen as normal for politicians to spend that much time and care making a case.

Just imagine it today. Okay, insert here your favorite remark about the linguistic abilities of the current president. But more to the point, notice that no president of any politics, no matter how articulate, would make a speech today of the kind that Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone considered bread and butter. Bill Clinton would have been eminently capable of it, but there is no place in our modern culture for sustained oral argumentation of that kind.

Television hasn’t helped, but long before that, amplification made speeches less theatrical and discouraged the old-time length and richness of content.

Yet if there were more room for carefully composed, seriously suasive addresses today, our political conversation would be better informed and less polarized.

Rather than, say, the conversation I heard last weekend in the after-performance discussion of a play that addresses the morality of torture in intelligence gathering. (The nature of the plotting is such that I will refrain from identifying the play for theatergoers’ sake.) The questioners from the audience, of a Times-reading liberal orientation, assumed that America is torturing innocents in neglect of unassailable confirmation that torture yields no useful information.

The Bush Administration has insisted that torture has indeed lent us crucial information. They apparently feel that certain practices causing extreme discomfort or fright are sometimes necessary to protecting the nation. If that’s true, I’m open to hearing the argument — but a real one, not a brief string of bullet-point examples. I think of how Lord Palmerston would have presented his case: at length, in detail, in a venue aimed at the entire nation at one time.

After all, the audience has been given such arguments against torture. An example would be the Atlantic’s account last May of how non-coercive interrogation led to Abu Al-Zarqawi’s hideout last year. In comparison, the administration’s sound-bite parenthetical remarks to the contrary look like low-engagement obfuscation.

Certainly there are confidentiality issues. But — do these make a sustained defense utterly impossible? Is it a desirable alternative that millions conclude that the CIA unleashes jack-booted masochists on innocent foreigners out of bloodlust and xenophobia?

Or, the left is also dismayed at the recently passed Protect America Act of 2007. It stipulates that communications that begin or end in a foreign country may be wiretapped by the U.S. government without supervision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. A common notion is that it is a short step from this to the government snooping around in the private lives of you and me for no justifiable reason.

I, personally, find it hard to imagine the Feds drifting back to the sorts of things J. Edgar Hoover and his boys used to pull. However, I don’t have much imagination: it’s why I don’t write novels. Many have more imagination than me, and are bitterly contemptuous of their current government, deaf to any possibility that unwarranted wiretapping within the nation’s boundaries could be wielded in their interest.

And let’s face it — they are given no sustained case otherwise. For example, the administration resists specifying why they are unwilling to simply rely on the emergency provisions for acquiring a warrant under the original version of FISA. The left thinks the reason is something sinister up Republican sleeves.

Legal theorist Richard Posner did tell us last year that FISA is “hopeless as a framework for detecting terrorists” because it “requires that surveillance be conducted pursuant to warrants based on probable cause to believe that the target of surveillance is a terrorist, when the desperate need is to find out who is a terrorist.”

Okay — but that was in a quick newspaper editorial. Disraeli would have considered that a crumb. Mr. Posner and others have made more extended arguments — but in wonkish venues. Where’s the speech, by a political leader?

In the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony was doing an hour-long address as a stump speech: she made a case. I wonder if there is really no room for speeches like that, of maybe just an hour, in our culture. We are an antiintellectual nation — but that was true in 1870. And however short our attention spans have become, we don’t have trouble with three-hour movies — or 90-minute documentaries.

Maybe I have more of an imagination than I suppose, and in this case, too much. But when I heard the playwright claim that Harper’s was the only place where he had seen the morality of torture in Guantanamo even discussed, I thought of old photos of surging throngs turning out to listen to Gladstone make cases at length. The Victorians’ political culture was far from perfect, but in their conception of what a speech was, they had something on us.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.