The Making of Arguments

the debate must rise to the level of that principle and let practical considerations go. And every citizen who has the advantage of having had more education than his fellows is thereby placed under obligation to hold the debate to this higher level. 58. The Appeal of Style. Finally, we have to consider the appeal to the emotions, which is the distinguishing essence of eloquence, and the attempts at it. In part this appeal is through the appeal to principles and associations which are close to the heart of the audience, in part through concrete and figurative language, in part through the indefinable thrill and music of style which lies beyond definition and instruction. The appeal to venerated principle we have considered already, looked at from the side of morals rather than of emotions. But morality, so far as it is a coercive force in human conduct, is emotional; our moral standards lie beyond and above reason in that larger part of our nature that knows through feeling and intuition. All men have certain standards and principles whose names arouse strong and reverent emotions. Such standards are not all religious or moral in the stricter sense; some of them have their roots in systems of government. In a case at law, argued purely on a question of law, there does not seem much chance for the appeal to feeling; but Mr. Joseph H. Choate, in his argument on the constitutionality of the Income Tax of 1894, before the Supreme Court of the United States, made the following appeal to the principle of the sanctity of private property, and the words he used could not have failed to stir deep and strong feelings in the court. No longer ago, if the Court please, than the day of the funeral procession of General Sherman in New York, it was my fortune to spend many hours with one of the ex-Presidents of the United States, who has since followed that great warrior to the bourne to which we were then bearing him. President Hayes expressed great solicitude as to the future fortunes of this people. In his retirement he had been watching the tendency of political and social purposes and events. He had observed how in recent years the possessors of political power had been learning to use it for the first time for the promotion of social and personal ends. He said to me, "You will probably live to see the day when in the case of the death of any man of large wealth the State will take for itself all above a certain prescribed limit of his fortune and divide it, or apply it to the equal use of all the people, so as to punish the rich man for his wealth, and to divide it among those who, whatever may have been their sins, at least have not committed that." I looked upon it as the wanderings of a dreaming man; and yet if I had known that within less than five short years afterwards I should be standing before this tribunal to contest the validity of an alleged act of Congress, of a so-called law, which was defended here by the authorized legal representatives of the Federal Government upon the plea that it was a tax levied only upon classes and extremely rich men, I should have given altogether a different heed and ear to the warnings of that distinguished statesman.62 Our emotions do not rise, however, anymore surely in the case of our veneration for the basal principles of religion and government than in that of more personal emotions. The appeal to the Constitution is worn somewhat threadbare by the politicians who call on it at every election, small or great, as is the appeal to the principles of the Pilgrim Fathers. It takes eloquence now to rouse our feelings about these principles. If you have a case important enough to justify appeal to such great principles and the skill in language to give your appeal vitality, you may really arouse your readers. But, on the whole, it is sound advice to say, Wait a few years before you call on them. The second mode of appeal to the feelings of your audience, that through concrete and figurative language, is more within the reach of advocates who are still of college age. This is particularly true of the use of concrete language. It is a matter of common knowledge that men do not rouse themselves over abstract principles; they will grant their assent, often without really knowing what is implied by the general principle, and go away yawning. On the other hand, the man who talks about the real and actual things which you know is likely to keep your attention. This goes back to the truth that our emotions and feelings are primarily the reaction to the concrete things that happen to us. The spontaneous whistling and humming of tunes that indicate a cheerful heart rise naturally as a response to the sunlight in spring; the fear at the terror that flies in a nightmare is the instinctive and physical reaction to indigestion; we sorrow over the loss of our own friends, but not over the loss of some one else's. The stories that stir us are the stories that deal with actual, tangible realities in such terms that they make us feel that we are living the story ourselves. Stevenson has some wise words on this subject in his essay, "A Gossip on Romance." The doctrine holds true for the making of arguments. Even where as in Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America," abstractness is not vagueness, the style would be more effective for the richer feeling that hangs over and around a concrete vocabulary. The great vividness of Macaulay's style, and its bold over so many readers, is largely due to his unfailing use of the specific word. If you will take the trouble to notice what arguments in the last few months have seemed to you especially persuasive, you will be surprised to find how definite and concrete the terms are that they use. Accordingly, if you wish to keep the readers of your argument awake and attentive, use terms that touch their everyday experience. If you are arguing for the establishment of a commission form of government, give in dollars and cents the sum that it cost under the old system to pave the three hundred yards of A Street, between 12th and 13th streets. The late Mr. Godkin of the New York Evening Post, in his lifelong campaign against corrupt government, to bring home to his readers the actual state of their city government and the character of the men who ran it, used their nicknames; "Long John" Corrigan, for example (if there had been such a personage); and "Bath-house John Somebody" has been a feature of campaigns in Chicago. The value of such names when skillfully used is that by their associations and connotation they do stir feeling. Likewise if you are arguing before an audience of graduates for a change from a group system to a free elective system in your college, you would use the names of courses with which they would be familiar and the names of professors under whom they had studied. If you were arguing for the introduction of manual training into a school, you would make taxpayers take an interest in the matter if you gave them the exact numbers of pupils from that school who have gone directly into mills or other work of the kind, and if you describe vividly just what is meant by manual training. If your description is in general terms they may grant you your principle, and then out of mere inertia and a vague feeling against change vote the other way. A rough test for concreteness is your vocabulary: if your words are mostly Anglo-Saxon you will usually be talking about concrete things; if it is Latinate and polysyllabic it is probably abstract and general. Most of the things and actions of everyday life, the individual things like "walls" and "puppies," "summer" and "boys," "buying" and "selling," "praying" and "singing," have names belonging to the Anglo-Saxon part of the language; and though there are many exceptions, like "tables," and "telephones," and "professors," yet the more your vocabulary consists of the non-Latinate words, the more likely it is to be concrete, and therefore to keep your readers' attention and feelings alive. Use the simple terms of everyday life, therefore, rather than the learned words which would serve you if you were generalizing from many cases. Stick to the single case before you and to the interests of the particular people you are trying to win over. To touch their feelings remember that you must talk about the things they have feelings about. The use of similes and metaphors and other figurative language raises a difficult question. On the whole, perhaps the best advice about using them is, Don't unless you have to. In other words, where a figure of speech is a necessity of expression, where you cannot make your thought clear and impart to it the warmth of feeling with which it is clothed in your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note; if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of insincerity is fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument. The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words—that indefinable part of their meaning which consists in their associations, implications, and general emotional coloring—lies their power to clothe thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. At the same time, they serve as a fillip to the attention. There are not very many people who can long keep the mind fixed on a purely abstract line of thought, and none can do it without some effort. Professor William James is a notable example of a writer whose thought flowed spontaneously into necessary figures of speech: When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things out of his private dream63 One cannot go to sleep over a style like that, for besides the obvious sincerity and rush of warm feeling, the vividness of the figures is like that of poetry. On the either hand, one must remember that it is given to few men to attain the unstudied eloquence of Professor James. Fables and anecdotes serve much the same purpose, but more especially throw into memorable form the principle which they are intended to set forth. There are a good many truths which are either so complex or so subtle that they defy phrasing in compact form, yet their truth we all know by intuition. If for such a truth you can find a compact illustration, you can leave it much more firmly fixed in your readers' minds than by any amount of systematic exposition. Lincoln in his Springfield speech, for example, threw into striking form the feeling which was so common in the North, that each step forward in the advance of slavery