The Making of Arguments Part 17

Of the same set of students forty-seven per cent of the smokers won places on varsity athletic teams, while only thirty-seven per cent of the nonsmokers could get places.

If the next to the last sentence had read, "Smoking therefore seems to be a cause of low scholars.h.i.+p," what should you think of the reasoning?

30. Criticize the reasoning in the following portion of an argument for prohibition:

Dr. Williams says, "We find no evidence that the prohibition laws have in the past been effective in diminis.h.i.+ng the consumption of alcoholic beverages." ... The absence of logic in Dr. Williams's conclusion will be readily seen by subst.i.tuting the homicide evil and the greed evil for the liquor evil in his argument.

Since its establishment the United States has sought to remedy with prohibition the homicide evil. Every state has laws with severe penalties prohibiting murder. And yet the number of homicides in the United States has steadily increased until the number in 1910 was eight thousand nine hundred and seventy-five. Since, then, homicides have steadily increased during the past hundred years under a law with severe penalties prohibiting them, a prohibitory law has not been and cannot be a remedy for homicide.

31. Criticize the reasoning in the following extract from an argument for the electrification of the terminal part of a railroad:

It is true that locomotive smoke and gas do not kill people outright; but that their influence though not immediately measurable is to shorten life cannot, I submit, be successfully combated.... A few years ago I made some calculations based on the records of ten years' operation of the railroads in this state, and found that if a man should spend his whole time day and night riding in railroad trains at an average rate of thirty miles an hour, and if he had average good luck, he would not be killed by accident, without his fault, oftener than once in fifteen hundred years, and that he would not receive any injury of sufficient importance to be reported oftener than once in five hundred years. I ask you to estimate how long a man would, in your opinion, live if he were obliged continuously day and night to breathe the air of our stations without any opportunity to relieve his lungs by a breath of purer and better air.

32. Give an example in which you yourself have used the method of agreement in arriving at a conclusion in the last week.

33. Give an example, from one of your studies, of the use of the method of agreement.

34. Give an example, which has recently come to your notice, of the use of the method of difference.

36. Criticize the following syllogisms, giving your reasons for thinking them sound or not:

a. All rich men should be charitable with their wealth; Charitable men forgive their enemies; Therefore all rich men should forgive their enemies.

b. Every man who plays baseball well has a good eye and quick judgment; Every good tennis player has a good eye and a quick judgment; Therefore every good tennis player is a good baseball player.

c. Whenever you find a man who drinks hard you find, a man who is unreliable; Our coachman does not drink hard; Therefore he is reliable.

d. All the steams.h.i.+ps which cross the ocean in the quickest time are comfortable; This steams.h.i.+p is slow; Therefore she is not comfortable.

e. All dogs who bark constantly are not bad-tempered; This dog does not bark constantly; Therefore he is not bad-tempered.

f. All cold can be expelled by heat; John's illness is a cold; Therefore it can be expelled by heat. (From Minto)

g. The use of ardent spirits should be prohibited by law, seeing that it causes misery and crime, which it is one of the chief ends of law to prevent. (From Bode)

h. Rational beings are accountable for their actions; brutes not being rational, are therefore exempt from responsibility. (From Jevons)

36. Expand the following arguments into syllogisms and criticize their soundness:

a. The snow will turn to rain, because it is getting warmer.

b. The boy has done well in his examination, for he came out looking cheerful.

c. We had an economical government last year, therefore the tax rate will be reduced.

d. Lee will be a good mayor, for men who have energy and good judgment can do incalculable good to their fellow citizens.

e. There is unshaken evidence that every member of the board of aldermen received a bribe, and George O. Carter was a member of that board.

f. The candidate for stroke on the freshman crew came from Santos School, therefore he must be a good oarsman.

37. Criticize the reasoning in the following arguments, pointing out whether they are sound or unsound, and why:

a. It costs a Nebraska farmer twenty cents to raise a bushel of corn. When corn gets down to twenty cents he cannot buy anything, and he cannot pay more than twelve or fifteen dollars a month for help. When it gets up to thirty-five cents the farmer gives his children the best education possible, and buys an automobile.

Therefore the farmer will be ruined if the tariff on corn is not raised.

b. For many years the Democratic platforms have declared explicitly or implicitly against the duties on sugar; if the Democrats should come into power and reduce the duties, they would lose their strength in the states producing cane sugar and beet sugar; if they do not reduce the duty, they admit that their platforms have been insincere. (Condensed from an editorial in a newspaper. March, 1911)

c. I hardly need say that I am opposed to any such system as that of Galveston, or to call it by its broader name, the commission system.

It is but another name for despotism. Louis XIV was a commissioner for executing the duties of governing France. Philip II was the same in Spain. The Decemvirs and Triumvirs of Rome were but the same sort of thing, as was also the Directory in France. They all came to the same end. Says Madison, in No. XLVII of _The Federalist_: "The acc.u.mulation of all powers, legislative and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be p.r.o.nounced the very definition of tyranny." Mr. justice Story said, "Whenever these departments are all vested in one person or body of men, the government is in fact a despotism, by whatever name it be called, whether a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy."

d. The procedure of Berlin has in it an element of fairness worthy of our consideration; those representing large property interests have a surety of being at least represented. Some such system must be devised if the holding of properly at all be regarded as moral and necessary to our civilization. Remember that you are, in a large sense, but a chartered joint-stock corporation. Can you imagine the control of any other joint-stock corporation delivered over to those who have no stock or the least stock in it? Can you imagine the New York & New Haven Railroad, for example, controlled by the pa.s.sengers, to the exclusion of the stock holders? Now this, to a very great degree, is what has happened in many of our cities. We have deprived the true stockholders, in some cases, of any representation whatever. I thus hold that to give property some voice in the control of a munic.i.p.al corporation is but sense and justice.

e. We have tried commissions in Buffalo in branches of our city government. They have tried them in nearly every city in this country. We have governed our police by commissions, our parks by commissions, our public works by commissions. Commission government was for many years a fad in this country, and it has become discredited, so that of late we have been doing away with commissions and coming to single heads for departments having executive functions and some minor legislative functions, such as park boards, and police boards, and have been trying to concentrate responsibility in that way. In Erie County and throughout New York a commission elected by the people governs our counties. The board of supervisors is a commission government. It has never been creditable--always bad, even as compared with our city governments.

To be sure, it is not just that kind of commission government. It is a larger commission; it is not elected at large, but by districts, but it is an attempt at the same thing. So I say there is nothing new about this idea of government by a commission.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARGUMENT WRITTEN OUT

49. The Brief and the Argument. If your brief is thoroughly worked out, and based on a careful canva.s.s of the evidence, the work on your argument ought to be at least two thirds over. The last third, however, is not to be slighted, for on it will largely depend your practical results in moving your readers. Even a legal argument rarely goes to the court on a written brief alone; and the average reader will never put himself to the effort of reading through and grasping such a brief as we have been planning here. Furthermore, if your complete argument is merely a copying out of the brief into consecutive sentences and paragraphs, you will get few readers. The making of the brief merely completes what may be called the architectural part of your labors; the writing of an argument will use all the skill you have in the choice of words and putting them together.

We saw in Chapter I that argument has two kinds of appeal to its reader: on the one hand, through its power of convincing it appeals to his reason; on the other, through its persuasive power it appeals to his feelings and his moral and practical interests. Of these two kinds of appeal the convincing power is largely determined by the thoroughness of the a.n.a.lysis and the efficiency of the arrangement, and therefore in large part hangs on the work done in making the brief; the persuasive power, on the other hand, though in part dependent on the line of attack laid out in the brief and the choice of points to argue, is far more dependent on the filling in of the argument in the finished form.

Even the severest scientific argument, however, is much more than the bare summary of the line of thought which would be found in a brief; and in an argument like the speeches in most political campaigns a brief of the thought would leave out most of the argument. Wherever you have to stir men up to do things you have only begun when you have convinced their reason.

50. The Introduction of the Argument. Much depends on the first part of your argument, the introduction. Its length varies greatly, and it may differ largely in other ways from the introduction to your brief.

If the people you are trying to convince are familiar with the subject, you will need little introduction; a brief but clear statement of fundamentals will serve the purpose. For such an audience it is chiefly important to make the issues stand out, so that they shall see perfectly distinctly the exact points on which the question turns. Then the sooner you are at work on the business of convincing them, the better. In such arguments the introduction will perhaps not differ greatly in substance from the introduction to the brief, though it must be reduced to consecutive and agreeable form. At the other extreme is such an argument as that of Huxley's (p. 233), where he had to prepare the way very carefully lest the prejudice against a revolutionary and unfamiliar view of the animate world should close the minds of his hearers against him before he was really started. Accordingly, before getting through with his introduction he expounded not only the three hypotheses between which the choice must be made, but also the law of the uniformity of nature and the principles and nature of circ.u.mstantial evidence. Where one shall stop between these two extremes is a question to be decided in the individual argument.

One thing, however, it is almost always wise to do; indeed, one would not go far wrong in prescribing it as a general rule: that is, to state with almost bald explicitness just how many main issues there are, and what they are. In writing an argument it is always safe to a.s.sume that most of your readers will be careless readers. Few people have the gift of reading closely and accurately, and of carrying what they have read with any distinctness. Therefore make it easy for your readers to pick up and to carry your points. If you tell them that you are going to make three points or five, they are much more likely to remember those three or five points than if they have to pick them out for themselves as they go along. Huxley, perhaps the ablest writer of scientific argument in the language, constantly practiced this device. In his great argument on evolution, he says (see p. 235): "So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of nature"; and then, as will be seen, he takes up each in turn, with the numbering "first," "second,"

and "third." In the same way in his essay "The Physical Basis of Life"

he says, not far from the beginning, "I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity--namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition--does pervade the whole living world." Burke, in his great speech "On Conciliation with America," said, "The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide are two: first, whether you ought to concede; and secondly, what your concession ought to be."

It is hardly too much to say that those writers whose sense of style is most developed are most likely to state the issues with the baldest and most direct precision.

The statement of the issues will bring out the importance of closely limiting the number of main issues. There are few subjects of argument which do not conceivably touch the interests and beliefs of their audiences in many directions; but out of these aspects some obviously count far more than others. If in your introduction you try to state all these issues, small and great, you will surely leave confusion behind you. Very few people are capable of carrying more than three or four issues distinctly enough to affect their judgment of the whole case; and even of these some will not take the trouble to do so. If you can simmer down the case to one or two or three critical points, you are making a good start toward winning over the minds of your readers.

A good statement of the history of the case is apt to be a useful and valuable part of an introduction, especially for arguments dealing with public policies. If you remind readers of what the facts have been, you can more easily make clear to them the present situation from which you make your start. An argument for raising or lowering the tariff on some article would be apt to recount the history of the tariff so far as it concerned that article, and the progress in importing it and manufacturing it within the country. In writing out the argument from the brief on page 90 one would almost inevitably include the recent history of the city government.

In general it is best to make this preliminary statement of the history of the case scrupulously and explicitly impartial. An audience is likely to resent any appearance of twisting the facts to suit the case; and if on their face they bear against your contentions, it is wiser to prepare for your argument in some other way. There are more ways of beginning an argument than by a statement of facts; and resource in the presentation of a case goes a long way toward winning it.

It is often wise to state your definitions with care, especially of terms which are at the bottom of your whole case. The definition from Bagchot on page 58 is a good example. Here is the beginning of an address by President Eliot, in 1896, on "A Wider Range of Electives in College Admission Requirements":

As usual, it is necessary to define the subject a little. "A wider range of electives in college admission requirements." What field are we thinking of when we state this subject? If we mean the United States, the range of electives is already very large. Take, for example, the requirements for admission to the Leland Stanford University. Twenty subjects are named, of very different character and extent, and the candidate may present any ten out of the twenty. Botany counts just as much as Latin. There is a wide range of options at admission to the University of Michigan, with its numerous courses leading to numerous degrees; that is, there is a wide range of subjects permissible to a candidate who is thinking of presenting himself for some one of its many degrees. If we look nearer home, we find in so conservative an inst.i.tution as Dartmouth College that there are three different degrees offered, with three different a.s.sortments of admission requirements, and three different courses within the college. I noticed that at the last commencement there were forty-one degrees of the old-fas.h.i.+oned sort and twenty-seven degrees of the newer sorts given by Dartmouth College. Here in Harvard we have had for many years a considerable range of electives in the admission examinations, particularly in what we call the advanced requirements. We therefore need to limit our subject a little by saying that we are thinking of a wider range of admission electives in the Eastern and Middle State colleges, the range of electives farther west being already large in many cases.[54]