The Making of Arguments

be found in books, magazines, and official reports. The good you will get from arguments on such subjects lies largely in finding out how to look up material. The difficulty with them lies in their size and their complexity. When it is remembered that a column of an ordinary newspaper has somewhere about fifteen hundred words, and that an editorial article such as on page 268, which is thirty-eight hundred words long, is in these days of hurry apt to be repellent, because of its length, and on the other hand that a theme of fifteen hundred words seems to the ordinary undergraduate a weighty undertaking, the nature of this difficulty becomes clear. To put it another way, speeches on public subjects of great importance are apt to be at least an hour long, and not infrequently more, and in an hour one easily speaks six or seven thousand words, so that fifteen hundred words would not fill a fifteen-minute speech. This difficulty is met in debates by the longer time allowed, for each side ordinarily has an hour; but even then there can be no pretense of a thorough treatment. The ordinary written argument of a student in school or college can therefore do very little with large public questions. The danger is that a short argument on a large question may breed in one an easy content with a superficial and parrotlike discussion of the subject. Discussions of large and abstract principles are necessary, but they are best left to the time of life when one has a comprehensive and intimate knowledge of the whole mass of facts concerned. By far the best kind of subject, as has been said, is that which will combine some personal acquaintance with the facts and the possibility of some research for material. Many such subjects may be found in the larger educational questions when applied to your own school or college. Should the elective system be maintained at Harvard College, Should the University of Illinois require Latin for the A.B. degree, Should fraternities be abolished in—— High School, Should manual training be introduced in—— High School, are all questions of this sort. A short list of similar questions is printed at the end of this section, which it is hoped will prove suggestive. For discussing these questions you will find considerable printed material in educational and other magazines, in reports of presidents of colleges and school committees, and other such places, which will give you practice in hunting up facts and opinions and in weighing their value. At the same time training of your judgment will follow when you apply the theories and opinions you find in these sources to local conditions. Moreover, such questions will give you practice in getting material in the raw, as it were, by making up tables of statistics from catalogues, by getting facts by personal interview, and in other ways, which will be considered in Chapter II. Finally, such subjects are much more likely to be of a size that you can bring to a head in the space and the time allowed to the average student, and they may have some immediate and practical effect in determining a question in which your own school or college has an interest. Arguments on such subjects are therefore less likely to be "academic" discussions, in the sense of having no bearing on any real conditions. When every college and school has plenty of such subjects continually under debate, there seems to be no reason for going farther and faring worse. The main thing is to get a subject which will carry you back to facts, and one in which you will be able to test your own reasoning. 6. Suggestions of Subjects for Practice. Many of the subjects in the list below will need some adaptation to fit them to local conditions; and these will undoubtedly suggest many others of a similar nature. Other subjects of immediate and local interest may be drawn from the current newspapers; and the larger, perennial ones like prohibition, woman suffrage, immigration laws, are always at the disposal of those who have the time and the courage for the amount of reading they involve. The distinction between a subject and the proposition to be argued will be made in Chapter II. SUGGESTIONS FOR SUBJECTS OF ARGUMENTS TO BE ADAPTED TO LOCAL AND PRESENT CONDITIONS 1. Admission to this college should be by examination only. 2. The entrance requirements of this college set a good standard for a public high-school course. 3. Admission to this college should be by certificate from the candidate's school, such as is now accepted at—— College. 4. The standards for admission to this college or to the State University should be raised. 5. The standard for graduating from this college should be raised. 6. Attendance at chapel exercises should be made voluntary. 7. The numbers of students in this college should be limited by raising the standard for admission. 8. A reading knowledge of French or of German, to be tested by an oral examination, should be substituted for the present requirements for entrance in those languages. 9. No list of books should be prescribed for the entrance examination in English. 10. Freshmen should be required to be within bounds by eleven o'clock at night. 11. Freshmen should not be elected to college societies. 12. Students who have attained distinction in their studies should be treated as graduate students are, in respect to attendance and leave of absence. 13. Arrangements should be made by which the work done on college papers should count toward the degree. 14. The honor system in examinations should be introduced into this college. 15. The course of study in this college should be made wholly elective. 16. Coeducation should be maintained in this college. 17. Secret societies should be prohibited in—— High School. 18. The business course in—— High School should be given up. 19. Compulsory military drill should be introduced into—— School (or, into this college). 20. Greek should be given up in—— School. 21. All students in—— School, whether in the business course or not, should be required to study Latin. 22. Athletics have had a detrimental effect on the studies of those who have taken part in them. 23.—— School should engage in athletic contests with two other schools only. 24. The school committee in—— should be reduced to five members. 25. The school committee in—— is at present too large for efficient direction of the schools. 26. The principal of the high school in—— should report directly to the school committee and not to the superintendent of schools. 27. This city should assign a sum equal to—— mills of the whole tax rate to the support of the public schools. 28. The high school of this city should have a single session each day, instead of two. 29. This city should substitute a commission government on the general model of that in Des Moines, Iowa, for the present system. 30. The commission form of government has proved its superiority to government by a mayor and two legislative boards. 31. This city should elect its municipal officers by preferential voting. 32. This city should establish playgrounds in the crowded parts of the city, notably in Wards—— and——. 33. Boys should be allowed to play ball in unfrequented streets. 34. This city should set apart—— mills on the tax rate each year for building permanent roads. 35. The laws and regulations governing the inspection and the sale of milk should be made more stringent. 36. This city should buy and run the waterworks. 37. This city should build future extensions of the street railway system and lease them to the highest bidder. 38. This city should buy and operate the street railway system. 38. The street railway company in this city should be required to pave and care for all the streets through which it runs. 40. A committee of business men should be appointed by the mayor to conduct negotiations for bringing new industries to the city. 41. This city should establish municipal gymnasiums. 42. This city would be benefited by the consolidation of the two street railway systems. 43. This state should adopt a ballot law similar to that of Massachusetts. 44. This state should adopt the "short ballot." 45. This state should tax forest lands according to the product rather than the assessed value of the land. 46. The present rules of football are satisfactory. 47. This college should make "soccer" football one of its major sports. 48. Unnecessary talking by the players should be forbidden in games of baseball. 49. Coaching from the side lines should be forbidden in baseball. 50. "Summer baseball" should be regarded as a breach of amateur standing. 51. An intercollegiate committee of graduates should be formed with power to absolve college athletes from technical and minor breaches of the amateur rules. 52. This college should make an effort to return to amateur coaching by proposing agreements to that effect with its principal rivals. 53. This university should not allow students with degrees from other institutions to play on its athletic teams. 54. The managers of the principal athletic teams in this college should be elected by the students at large. 55. The expenses of athletic teams at this college should be considerably reduced. 7. The Two Kinds of Arguments. With the subject you are going to argue on chosen, it will be wise to come to closer quarters with the process of arguing. A large part of the good results you will get from practice in writing arguments will be the strengthening of your powers of exact and keen thought; I shall therefore in the following sections try to go somewhat below the surface of the process, and see just what any given kind of argument aims to do, and how it accomplishes its aim by its appeal to special faculties and interests of the mind. I shall also consider briefly the larger bearings of a few of the commoner and more important types of argument, as the ordinary citizen meets them in daily life. We may divide arguments roughly into two classes, according as the proposition they maintain takes the form, "This is true," or the form, "This ought to be done." The former we will call, for the sake of brevity, arguments of fact, the latter arguments of policy. Of the two classes the former is addressed principally to the reason, the faculty by which we arrange the facts of the universe (whether small or great) as they come to us, and so make them intelligible. You believe that the man who brought back your dog for a reward stole the dog, because that view fits best with the facts you know about him and the disappearance of the dog; we accept the theory of evolution because, as Huxley points out at the beginning of his essay (see pp. 233, 235), it provides a place for all the facts that have been collected about the world of plants and animals and makes of them all a consistent and harmonious system. In Chapter III we shall come to a further consideration of the workings of this faculty so far as it affects the making of arguments. Arguments of policy, on the other hand, which argue what ought to be done, make their appeal in the main to the moral, practical, Or aesthetic interests of the audience. These interests have their ultimate roots in the deep-seated mass of inherited temperamental motives and forces which may be summed up here in the conveniently vague term "feeling." These motives and forces, it will be noticed, lie outside the field of reason, and are in the main recalcitrant to it. When you argue that it is "right" that rich men should endow the schools and colleges of this country, you would find it impossible to explain in detail just what you mean by "right"; your belief rises from feelings, partly inherited, partly drawn in with the air of the country, which make you positive of your assertion even when you can least give reasons for it. So our practical interests turn in the end on what we want and do not want, and are therefore molded by our temperament and tastes, which are obviously