The Making of Arguments

its use in connection with the state, it is used to designate the most concentrated and centralized type of organization which has yet appeared in the annals of representative municipal history. Under so-called commission government for cities, the entire administration of the city's affairs is placed in the hands of a small board or council—"commission"—elected at large and responsible directly to the electorate for the government of the city.7 Furthermore, even the term "commission government for cities" is not wholly definite, for there are already several recognized types of such government, such as the Galveston type, the Des Moines type, and recent modifications of these. If you are making an argument for introducing a commission government, therefore, you must go still further with your definitions, and specify the distinguishing features of the particular plan which you are urging on the voters, as is done in the definition on page 59. In other words, you must make exactly clear the meaning of the term for the present case. Your first impulse when you find a term that needs defining may be to go to a dictionary. A little thought will show you that in most cases you will get little comfort if you do. The aim of a dictionary is to give all the meanings which a word has had in reasonable use; what you need in an argument is to know which one of these meanings it has in the present case. If you were writing an argument on the effects or the righteousness of the change wrought in the English constitution by the recent curtailment of the veto power of the House of Lords, and wished to use the word "revolution," and to use it where it was important that your readers should understand precisely what you intended it to convey, you would not burden them with such a definition as the following, from an unabridged dictionary: "Revolution: a fundamental change in political organization, or in a government or constitution; the overthrow or renunciation of one government and the substitution of another, by the governed." Such a definition would merely fill up your space, and leave you no further ahead. A dictionary is studiously general, for it must cover all possible legitimate meanings of the word; in an argument you must be studiously specific, to carry your readers with you in the case under discussion. Moreover, words are constantly being pressed into new uses, as in the case of "commission" (see p. 54); and others have entirely legitimate local meanings. Only a dictionary which was on the scale of the New English Dictionary and which was reedited every five years could pretend to keep up with these new uses. In an unabridged dictionary dated 1907, for example, the full definition of "amateur" is as follows: "A person attached to a particular pursuit, study or science, as to music or painting; especially one who cultivates any study or art, from taste or attachment, without pursuing it professionally." Of what use would such a definition be to you if you were arguing in favor of strengthening or relaxing the amateur rules in college athletics, in which you had to follow through the intricacies of summer baseball and of reimbursements for training table and traveling expenses? Such a definition hardly comes in sight of the use of the word which is most in the mouths of college students in America. Words mean whatever careful and accepted writers have used them to mean; and the business of a dictionary is so far as possible to record these meanings. But language, being a living and constantly developing growth, is constantly altering them and adding to them. What a dictionary can do for you, therefore, is merely to tell you whether in the past the word has been used with the signification which you wish to give to it; but there are very few cases in which this will be much help to you, for in an argument your only interest in the meaning of a term is in the meaning of that term for the case under discussion. There are two quite different kinds of difficulty in putting the right interpretation on a statement, and a dictionary can only remove one of these, and by far the less important one. When you meet with a statement containing an unfamiliar word—say, the word "parallax," or "phanerogamous," or "brigantine"—and when you understand all the rest of the statement except that word, then as a general rule the dictionary will help to make the meaning clear. But when the difficulty is caused, not by a word being unfamiliar, but by its being used in a certain context, then the best dictionary in the world is, for your purpose, of no use at all. The nature of every dictionary is necessarily such that it entirely leaves out of account all doubts about meaning which are of this second kind. The most that a dictionary can do is to tell us the meaning of a word in those cases where the context in which it is used is not such as to make the meaning doubtful.8 In practice the words which most often need definition are those which are, as it were, shorthand symbols for perhaps a very extensive meaning. Unless the limits of this extended meaning are clearly marked out you cannot tell whether the minds of your readers are, as the lawyers say, running on all fours with your own or not. This extended meaning may be of various sorts: for example, it may be a large general principle, as in the case of "evolution" or "culture"; or it may be a general system or practice, as in the case of "commission government," "honor system," or "high standards for graduation"; or it may be a general class of things, persons, or events, as in the case of "secondary school," "professional coach," or "murder." When you use any such term in an argument, it is essential that your readers shall have the same set of details, ramifications, or instances in mind as you have yourself. For this purpose you must define the term; or, in other words, you must lay out or display the ramifications and limitations of the principle, the details of the system or practice, or the exact kinds of things, persons, or events, which you have in mind when you use the term. A few examples will make this practical meaning of defining clear. Sometimes the definition proceeds by careful and specific limitation of the general signification of a word, as in the following example from Bagchot: I should say that except where it is explained to the contrary, I use the word "toleration" to mean toleration by law. Toleration by society of matters not subject to legal penalty is a kindred subject, on which if I have room I will add a few words; but in the main I propose to deal with the simpler subject, toleration by law. And by toleration, too, I mean, when it is not otherwise said, toleration in the public expression of opinions; toleration of acts and practices is another allied subject, on which I can, in a paper like this, but barely hope to indicate what seems to me to be the truth, and I should add that I deal only with the discussion of impersonal doctrines: the law of libel, which deals with accusations of living persons, is a topic requiring consideration by itself.9 Sometimes the definition is rather an unfolding and displaying of the implications (from the Latin, implicare, to fold in) of the term. Huxley, near the beginning of his three "Lectures on Evolution," made sure by the following definition that his hearers should have a precise idea of what he meant by the term "evolution": The third hypothesis, or the hypothesis of evolution, supposes that, at any comparatively late period of past time, our imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very similar to that which now obtains; but that the likeness of the past to the present would gradually become less and less, in proportion to the remoteness of his period of observation from the present day; that the existing distribution of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions of the mineral framework of the earth; until, at length, in place of that framework, he would behold only a vast nebulous mass, representing the constituents of the sun and of the planetary bodies. Preceding the forms of life which now exist our observer would see animals and plants not identical with them, but like them; increasing their differences with their antiquity and, at the same time, becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity. The hypothesis of evolution supposes that in all this vast progression there would be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say, "This is a natural process," and "This is not a natural process," but that the whole might be compared to that wonderful process of development which may be seen going on every day under our eyes, in virtue of which there arises, out of the semifluid, comparatively homogeneous substance which we call an egg, the complicated organization of one of the higher animals. That, in a few words, is what is meant by the hypothesis of evolution.10 Here Huxley has laid out, in compact form the principal ramifications of the great principle of evolution, giving his hearers something like an outline map of it with its limits and principal divisions. Where you have a practice or system to define, you will be more likely to do it by specifying the chief and essential details of the system, as in the following definition of commission government for cities. It will be noticed that this narrows down the meaning of the term to something like the Des Moines system, as distinguished from the Galveston plan. A straight commission form of municipal government, in the judgment of Dr. Charles W. Eliot, one of its most active advocates, requires a commission composed of five members elected at large, one of whom is called the mayor, acting as chairman of the commission, but with no veto power, or any other special power not shared by the other members of the commission. The commission so elected is the source of all authority in the city, makes all ordinances, appoints all officials, collects taxes, and makes all appropriations. As set forth by its advocates, the significant features of the plan, in addition to those already mentioned, are: Assignment of the important divisions of the city government to individual members of the commission, or their election thereto by the voters, each being directly responsible for the conduct of his particular department; adequate compensation to the commissioners for their time and labor, the city employing all the commissioners at living salaries, thus elevating the dignity of municipal service and making it a public career, and not a mere avocation; regularity, frequency, and publicity of the meetings of the commissioners; all employees above the class of day laborers selected from eligible lists based on examinations, oral and written, carefully devised to develop merit and fitness; recommendations after examination by an independent civil service commission; provision for the retention in office of all employees so appointed during good behavior; the power to initiate legislation reserved to the people, this right being known as the initiative; the power to call for a public vote on any measure adopted by the commission before being given effect as law reserved to the people, this being known as the referendum; the power at any time to make any member of the commission stand for reelection reserved to