To take another illustration: We are all discussing the immigration question, these days. But one reason why there is so much loose thinking about immigration is that we are talking about different immigrants and from different angles and points of view. For instance, if we decide that immigration should be restricted, to what immigration do we refer? All immigration? Immigrants from southern Europe, from Asia, or from the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic nations? Or shall the restriction be governed by a literacy test? If so, what standard of literacy shall be established? Will the Greeks, such as those who shine our shoes and run our fruit stands, be shut out because they can not read the thrilling story of “The Cat saw the Rat” in the English primer, even though they read and enjoy Homer and Plato in the original? If you decide that the Homer test of literacy shall be applied, you must still connect that kind of culture with civic duties in some way before you have a question which properly belongs to the immigration problem. Otherwise you may wander fruitlessly among all those tangled mazes of classical learning which have afforded so many opportunities for talk and so little for debate.
Another illustration of the necessity of proper limitation of your subject: In considering the desirability of certain kinds of immigration, you may be discussing points which go only to the question of the admission of the foreigner to this country, and your opponent may be discussing matters relating to the treatment of that same foreigner as a worker in the factories or as a laborer on the big construction jobs of the country. The first refers to Federal restriction, the second to the State’s industrial treatment of the foreigner after he gets here. One member of the team, you see, would be talking about the government and legislation in Washington; the other about the government and legislation at Albany or Springfield or Topeka, as the case might be.
CHAPTER IV
GETTING READY
You have been challenged to debate by the Patrol from Readville or by the Debating Society of Berkeley. What is the next step? You should meet your opponents as early as possible and arrange the details with them.
Since the challenge set the question, that point is taken care of. The settlement of terms and issues, which is so important that I shall discuss it by itself in Chapter V, will provide for many things which would otherwise bother you much in your actual debate. Your conference with your friends the enemy will obviate so much haggling about shifting the burden of proof and defining terms that the ground will be cleared for real work when you actually get at your debate.
If your purpose is to get at the truth, not simply to win, you will of course at this preliminary conference seek to find as much common ground as possible. You want to equalize the contest. You have no desire to equip one side with a keen sword and a splendid shield and the other with a clumsy club. You will seek, therefore, so to formulate the point at issue between you that it will be a comparatively equal task for each side to find and present its evidence and its arguments.
Don’t try to trap the other side into some unfortunate position which will prove its undoing. Note the difference: in the actual debate, be merciless to your opponent’s argument, but before the debate and during it, treat him frankly and generously. Trail down his argument, track it to its lair, flay it, have no respect or mercy to it, but be sure you are remorselessly pursuing the contention and not the contender.
Don’t hold back information at this conference which may change the whole plan agreed upon if you introduce it in the debate itself. In other words be honest and be fair. You are under no obligation to tell the other side how you propose to handle your case, how you propose to develop your argument, how you expect to prove it, what you regard as essential and what subordinate. You must be fair, however, as to what the question really means.
You should be equally fair and frank with your colleagues. In the first place be square with them in the division of the work. Take your full share and do what you agree to do. Don’t leave things until the last minute and then depend upon hasty cramming to make up the lack of real work. Know a little something about all the case and all there is to know about your part of it.