It is astonishing what a great part of energy goes in our civilised and lettered society to controversy.
This country is certainly as civilised as any in Europe and it is much more lettered than any other. That is, there are more people bothering about print than you will find anywhere else. It has something to do, I think, with living in great towns and depending upon newspapers, but, anyhow, there it is, and one of its effects is a continued occupation in controversy. It always astonishes the foreign visitor, and I think it usually irritates the foreign resident. It is a habit often attacked, but all this opposition to it is a foreign opposition at bottom. To the native controversy is food and drink, and no one would be without it.
Now there is much more in this habit of controversy than meets the eye. If you were to call it a passion for wrangling you would be exactly contradicting its nature. It is dearest to those who hate wrangling. It is carefully preserved from reality. It is a sort of game, and has in it much the same instinct as makes men play other games in a game-loving country. Its object is not conviction, but scoring under set conditions, and it is most interesting to watch how the rules grow up of themselves and how strict they become.
It would be the death of controversy to demand a real conquest. When people begin to get into that mood controversy ends and fighting begins. Nations which are intent on real results fall into civil wars. Nothing is more opposed to the spirit of controversy than this spirit of arms and a creed. Controversy is to the search after ultimate truth, or the desire for conviction, what fencing with foils is to slashing with cavalry swords, or what shooting for a challenge shield is to sniping from a tree at the other person in the mud.
Its weapon is advocacy. In pure, serene, absolute controversy the advocate will cheerfully take either side, but even in that less perfect controversy to which (alas!) our fallen nature condemns us, and in which there is some suspicion of real feeling, advocacy easily takes precedence over the statement of truth. And that is one of the delights of controversy, as no one knows better than they who have wasted and enjoyed their lives in this delicious pastime.
I always think that there is an ill done to controversy when the lists are unequally chosen. It demands for its proper exercise fairly equal chances for either side. For instance, one man gets up and says that England would be much better off if no foreign goods came into it, whereupon the other man, scenting a controversy from afar, says: "What about tea?" There at once—at the very issue of the bout—you have a knockout, and that spoils sport. Or again, a man says: "If you want to improve the communications of London you must have wider streets, and you cannot have wider streets without interfering with privileged pieces of property." The moment you begin to talk like that controversy is abominably offended. You might as well play chess with a loaded revolver, or come to the football field with a posse of bravoes.
No, the essence of this admirable exercise is a sort of "picking up sides" which balances the argument. You must give reasonable chances for advocacy to either party. Chalk the lists, face the champions square, and then let go.
I notice a very proper contempt for, and sometimes interference with, that party to a controversy who breaks even the less understood and more subtle rules: for instance, dropping the "Mr." in Politics. You may say of a parliamentarian, "Mr. Biggs was committing political murder when he poured his hidden poison into the sleeping ear of Mr. Higgs." That is all right. It means that old Biggs thought he could get more money by abandoning his leader Higgs. The use of the two "Misters" proves that in your heart you care not a dump which gets the salary, contracts, and perks. But if you say "Biggs won't take office under Higgs because he thinks there's no money in it," that is blackguardly: for it spoils sport.
It is thus a breach of the rules to impute what are called "unworthy motives"; that is, serious motives. Both parties must, like the champions of the ring, shake hands; and there are a lot of little phrases (they are kept set up in most newspaper offices, and in some are stereotyped in ready-made bars) which come in most usefully for this purpose. Such are "No-one-can-dispute (Mr. Noggins's) scholarship-or-his-quite peculiar-knowledge-of (Samian ware)," after which you go on to argue that in point of fact Noggins is as ignorant as the beasts that perish, and you support your contention with special pleading.
So deep-rooted is this love of controversy that one of its favourite playing-fields is what one would imagine to be sacred ground, to wit, the security and happiness of one's own country. Jones has only to say that he wants his country to win in some war of life and death, for Brown, tempted by so admirable an occasion, to come up on the other side. But what does Brown do? Do you suppose he says, "I want my country to perish?" Not a bit of it; that would not be controversy at all, and, what is more, it would be an impossible position for Brown to take up, considering that Brown, by the very fact that he is conducting such a controversy, is stamping his chief national characteristic all over himself. So what Brown does is to show how defeat would ultimately enhance the glory and increase the strength of the country. Both parties agree to this special limited area of operations, and within it they spar round and round and round. Meanwhile, the real war goes on, no harm is done at home, and the nation wins or loses without a link between that awful reality of war and the spillikin-match at home.