DEBATING FOR BOYS

DEBATING FOR BOYS

BY
WILLIAM HORTON FOSTER

New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1915

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1913
By THE PERRY MASON COMPANY

Copyright, 1913, 1914
By THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1915
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published, August, 1915

PREFACE

The judge, in awful ermine, on the bench; the jury, glowering, in its box; the prisoner, the book, in the dock: enter in humility, the attorney for the defense, the preface.

“What excuse for existence has the prisoner?” thunders the judge in tones that make the culprit’s leaves shake.

In cringing deference, the attorney for the defense falters, “None, your lordship, none, but....”

Such is the scene that many prefaces suggest. This preface, however, is different—and quite shameless. It says, merely, that the title “Debating for Boys” carries its own statement of its reason for being. Boys like to debate; debating will do them good. This volume is a simple, unpretentious manual designed to help boys to debate efficiently—to get from the most manly of all sports, and a royal sport it is, all of the pleasure and profit it has to offer. The book is designed, first of all, as an aid to the boy himself—in home, club, school, church—and, also, as an aid to the father, club director, teacher, clergyman, all, in fact, who are his friends and advisers.

I wish to thank The Youth’s Companion for its courteous permission to reprint one chapter which originally appeared upon its Boys’ Page; Boys’ Life, the Boy Scouts’ magazine, for kind consent to the republication of much matter which first saw the light of print in its columns; Mr. Henry Smith Chapman for valuable material upon parliamentary law; and Mr. Warren Dunham Foster for his general editorial direction of the book.

Acknowledgment is due Mr. Rollo L. Lyman of the University of Chicago, and Mr. George P. Baker of Harvard, whose methods of teaching argumentation have become standard.

W. H. F.

Boston, Massachusetts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEBATING FOR BOYS

CHAPTER I
WHY BOYS SHOULD DEBATE

For two reasons I am going to discuss with you the theories of debating.

In the first place, the debate of the boys’ club, of the school society, or of the city lyceum, is the same in form and method as the debates in legislature or Congress. Any lad who is trained to debate, who knows his subject, who is logical and direct, who is frightened neither at his own voice nor of his opponent’s ability, will later in life be able to meet an opponent in the larger halls of the capital. He will find it no different in Washington than it was in the village school—his audience will be larger and his judges different but the rules governing his thought and its expression will be the same.

In the second place, when he is effectively trained in debate, he is also completely equipped for the more informal thought and discussion which is his daily habit. When from his study and practice of debating, he knows something of logic, something of the ordinary rules of evidence, something of the organization of an argument, he will be impatient and intolerant of weak and jointless talk, even in informal discussion. Every one has overheard in crowds talk which has passed for argument but has been as formless as a jelly-fish—merely talk. It began nowhere and ended nowhere. So I propose to discuss debating because it will prepare you for the highest responsibilities which may be placed upon you, while at the same time it will equip you for the everyday duties of active boyhood and later manhood.

Purpose of Debating.—Remember then that debate is simply the spoken argument presented formally; what is its purpose?

The answer is, not to beat the other side, but to get at the facts.

Now in some games, although of course it is of prime importance that the contest be manly and the sport clean, there is a distinct value in the strife itself and victory is sought for its own sake; the element of right or wrong does not enter into the question at all. There is no right or wrong to it. But in debate the purpose is not to win at any cost; not to confuse the opponent, nor to trick him, but to win by absolute strength of argument—to present such argument as will show the facts. In debates the truth is wanted—not necessarily the decision, the victory. For the purpose and object of debate is to determine upon some course of action, to arrive at some decision; it is a poor sort of victory which secures a decision at the expense of facts.

For example, suppose that you are a Boy Scout and that your patrol has decided upon a hike to Mt. Rainier. The first question to discuss and settle will be the best route to take. Jack Prentice may know the way absolutely, but may not be nearly so fluent a talker as Frank Gordon, who with very little knowledge of the proposed hike, could easily silence poor Jack in the discussion.

What will be the effect of Frank’s victory, if he gains it? If Jack is made to look ridiculous in discussion, if he loses his presence of mind and so stammers over his statements that his fellow Scouts lose patience and take Frank’s more fluent speech for fact and adopt his proposed route, what will it all avail if they take the wrong road? Will it not be a hollow victory in the end? And will his victory add to Frank’s reputation, although his fellows may be very willing to admit his cleverness? Will not that very cleverness make them all the more unwilling to trust his future arguments, when they remember this failure?

On the other hand what about Jack? Is our only feeling toward him one of sympathy? No, he should have trained his powers, he should have early “found himself” so that he would not fall an easy victim to mere cleverness. In other words, Frank is responsible for the use he made of his powers, and Jack is responsible for the use he did not make of his. If the patrol got caught off the road on the hike, I imagine they would blame both Frank and Jack about equally.

Debate Must Lead to Action.—Now you may not at first see the parallel between a debate on the best route for a proposed hike and a general debate on conservation, for example. Both, however, are really governed by the same rules and their purpose and object is the same. In the plans for your hike, you proposed to do something, to go somewhere; if the question of conservation is up for discussion it is with some definite end in view, not simply as an excuse for general talk about it. The discussion which does not lead to a definite plan of action is not truly argument. If after your audience, whether it is your patrol, your debating club, or later your legislature, has listened to you, it says “What a fine speech!” you have failed. The audience should be convinced to the point of action. Demosthenes said to his rival, “When the Athenians listen to you they say ‘What a fine speech!’ When they hear me they say, ‘Let’s go fight against Philip.’” So any argument, and debate, must convince the hearers that the facts are as claimed, that the deductions based upon these facts are sound and that the course advised is correct. Finally and supremely, it must lead somewhere; it must have a definite plan to propose and must lead the hearers to follow that plan.

Benefits to the Individual.—If, then, the purpose of debate is to get at the facts and to determine the proper action to be taken with reference to those facts, what are the benefits of debate to the debater himself? They are many and varied.

Training in Self-Control.—In the first place, there is the training in self-control which comes to the debater. Sometimes one can face a physical emergency with fortitude when he shrinks from a situation which calls for no physical pluck at all. Only a few years ago a famous Harvard football player who had been the mainstay of his team in many a scrimmage actually fainted away when he first attempted to take part in a debate. When he was revived he was so disgusted with himself that he insisted on trying again, and he did, after a fashion, go through his part in the debate. Mortified at his failure, he persisted in as strenuous a course in his debating class as ever had been imposed upon him by his football coach. He won, and became one of Harvard’s star debaters. You see, the physical self-control he had acquired on the gridiron was not available to him in debate; but it is the skill in debate which is now helping him in after life—not necessarily his football prowess.

Training to Meet Emergencies.—You will learn how to meet emergencies if you become skillful in debate. Most of us can frame a fair argument if we can sit quietly down and think it out with no one to bother us. But to be able to control and command your resources so that they are ready for quick action—that is a different ability—an ability that work in debating will give you. If Jack has studied out his question he may be able to give a very strong argument for it. But suppose Frank is there to ask Jack questions or to suggest measures contrary to those he is advocating, Jack is likely to lose in his argument unless he has so prepared himself that Frank’s counter arguments have already been considered and provided for. You will see that it is not enough to have arguments—you must have them ready for use. It is a good deal like a camping equipment; it will not aid you in the woods if it is packed away at home. This preparedness, as far as argument is concerned, debating will teach you.

Knowing—Not Doing.—You know education is a process of preparing a man to get the most out of himself and the most out of life. In many cases, however, a boy knows a great deal but can do but very little. I have known boys who could tell you all about the various methods of signaling since Gideon trained his troop of warriors; yet, if you should ask these boys, they couldn’t actually send the simplest message. They know, but they can not do. Now the training in meeting emergencies which debating gives a boy, lays the emphasis on quick decision, but above all on quick decision that means action.

This training in self-control which practice in debating gives is invaluable in after life. When the boy, for instance, is after a job, if he has self-control he will be able to face his possible employer with courage and to put up the front he is entitled to show. The timid boy, however, will probably be unable to present his claims in a fashion that shows their merit. Many other such cases will occur to any of you.

Debating Forms Habits of Correct Speech.—Next to its value in training for self-control, practice in debating is valuable in the formation of correct habits of speech. I do not mean the “fine writing” we recognize so easily, which is sometimes beautiful but more often only funny. I mean that direct English which aims to say certain things in the simplest fashion and in the fewest words. Never to use a long word when a short one will express the exact meaning, never to use a foreign word or a word of foreign derivation when a plain Saxon word will do—a few such rules as these will soon form a clear clean style, and no drill equals the debate for the recognition of this style or its opposite, huge bombastic statement. Haven’t you noticed how much worse a poor sentence sounds than it looks? It is like comparing cannon balls with toy balloons—they may look about the same size and may have the same general appearance but to use them—well, I would rather juggle with toy balloons than with cannon balls but the cannon balls would surely be the more reliable in an argument; which do you think would carry the most weight?

You surely recognize a clear exact style when you hear it, and you surely recognize slovenly careless speech when you hear it. Now you can’t in debate have a clean clear style if you haven’t a clean cut incisive argument—if you haven’t thought your subject through. And on the contrary, your very work thinking your argument out will strengthen your style and simplify your speech. Matters so ordinary as grammar and pronunciation will unconsciously correct themselves when you hear your own voice either gracing or disgracing your thought. Your vocabulary will be enlarged, your diction clarified, and, on the physical side, your articulation will be clearer and more distinct; you will learn to stand squarely on both feet and not wander aimlessly about or sway as if blown upon by contending breezes. You see, if you think a moment, that every one of these things, so important to you whether as boy or man, is drilled into you by practice in debate.

Debating Means Constructive Thinking.—In the next place, not only is practice in debate invaluable in acquiring self-control and correct habits of speech, but also it teaches you to organize your own powers; it drills you in constructive thinking. In much of your school work, you learn and recite the words of others—either of teachers or of textbook writers. But if a subject for debate is proposed, you must think it out yourself. For example, if some such question is proposed for your debate as: “Is the conservation of the timber supply of the United States wise?” you at once must by your own independent thinking prepare your argument. Your teacher or other friends will aid you but you must work it out yourself. You will first ask yourself what you mean and what is meant generally by “conservation”; you will then ask where and how much the same policy has been tried in other countries, why it should be tried here and what results may be reasonably expected to follow the policy here. You catalogue the reasons for and against the proposed policy and weigh the moral questions involved, if any. You limit the question within its proper bounds—in short you build up the structure of your argument much as you would build a signal tower. You see that your foundations are properly laid and that every upright and brace is properly placed and jointed.

Debaters Can Detect False Reasoning.—Then when you have found yourself, when you have acquired mastery of yourself, of your manner and of your argument, practice in debating has an additional value still greater. You will learn to recognize sound reasoning wherever you hear it and will detect the false with equal ease. Without conscious effort on your part, you will apply to the casual argument as you meet it, to the public address, to the written article, to the newspaper editorial, those standards by which you have built up your own argument. It will be difficult for you to overlook inconsistency and false reasoning, for your mind will have become accustomed to exact and clear thinking—your habits of mind will have become standardized, as the factory expert would say.

CHAPTER II
WHAT DEBATE REALLY IS

I have failed in my argument so far unless I have accomplished two things. First, and most important, I must have convinced you that I am right as far as I have gone. Second, to have my argument really worth while, I must have done more—I must have made you want to debate. For an argument is only half an argument unless it brings you to the point of doing. In this particular it differs from many other kinds of speaking—contention for example.

In contention, the contender has very little hope as a rule of changing his adversary’s mind. He is not arguing; he is simply sticking up for his point. How much of what passes for argument belongs to this class of effort! You hear it in the street every day, and on the baseball diamond—did you ever hear the discussion over a disputed decision by the umpire? Did you ever hear any argument there? Did Captain Jack, or Captain Frank, or Captain Chance, or Captain McGraw, ever really think he could convince any jury, either of players, umpires or spectators, that he was really right?

Argument Differs Also From Persuasion.—There are other forms of mental effort expressed in spoken word, perfectly legitimate in themselves, which are not arguments, although generally classed as such. There is a difference between argument and persuasion.

Can you remember when you were trying to get your friend Bob or perhaps your whole crowd to follow your suggestion? How you coaxed and urged and teased. Of course that was many years ago but your argument (!) ran something like this, didn’t it?

“Oh, I say, Bob, come on down to the creek.”

“Let’s go in swimming!”

“Oh, yes!”

“Let’s!”

“Say, it’s just fun!”

“Oh, never mind getting in that kindling, you can do it after we get back—sure you can! You’ll have plenty of time, and besides your mother won’t care very much.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Don’t be a fraid cat!”

“You are a regular sissy! You dassn’t go—you have to stay close home! I tell you, I just do as I please—my ma lets me do just as I want to. She knows I would, anyway.”

“Oh, come on, Bob, be a good fellow!”

And so it would run on—not a particle of argument, nothing but appeal to the emotions, and those not of the loftiest kind.

But is that scene too boyish for you to remember? How about that time only a little while ago when you were not urging Bob to go down to the “old swimming hole,” but to a place not quite so harmless as that, the place where the creek backed up into a pond, muddy and actually shallow it must be confessed, but none the less better than any marble bath of emperor or king. Bob didn’t want to play pool with you in that pool-room your father said was no place for a boy, but you teased him into going. Your sneers at his desire to keep himself clean and sweet and “mind his mother” maybe were not quite so obvious as those earlier boyish effusions but they were none the less appeals to the weaker instincts.

And can you remember that hot day in July away back, when you were only a youngster you know? How you wanted the worst way to go fishing but Bob wanted to lie on the ground under the tree and read Campmates? How it just seemed to you as though you simply must go fishing, and yet how equally determined you were that you would not go alone but that Bob must go too, book or no book? You can remember how you teased and coaxed and urged, and finally how you bribed him by offering to give him that trade on the book he had wanted so long. You carried your point, but was it argument?

Can’t you remember, too, how you capped your final urgings of Bob only a few days ago by offering to introduce him to your cousin Nellie who had come from Fairfield to visit you? You knew Bob admired her greatly and you imagined that if you couldn’t get Bob to agree to your plan by your urging and coaxing, you could easily win him over, if you could promise him the coveted introduction.

No, lad, these scenes are not too boyish. They frame a point for you. The truth is that, so far as the fact of conviction or persuasion in argument is concerned, the bribe of the book and of the introduction to Nellie is on the same plane in the argument as the logic of the offer of money to the legislator to influence his mind in the debate wherein he engages.

Argument, therefore, is addressed in the first instance to reason alone; it may or may not be combined with persuasion but the two are absolutely different. The perfect argument will be so absolutely convincing, its logic will be so unanswerable that its hearers will be compelled by its very force to follow its conclusions since they can not escape them.

Blackhawk’s Appeal.—Generally, however, to the reasoning of the argument must be added the persuasion of the appeal to the instincts of love, duty, patriotism and the like. Now when this appeal is used or is the essential part of the so-called argument it is outside of true debate; it falls into a class that in some cases is higher than debate but nevertheless distinct. So when in our earlier history Blackhawk, as we say, debated the cause of his Sacs and Foxes, he did not really argue their case with cold calm reason but appealed to the sentiment of his hearers, to their sense of patriotism. Pontiac and Osceola never presented a series of logical reasons why their Indian brothers should be treated differently, but they did, as did other notable chieftains, often in passionate oratory, appeal to those emotions which dwell not in reason but in sentiment. If the questions between the red man and the white man were debated, reason would say that the red man had failed to use his heritage to the best advantage. It would argue that he had kept millions of acres of land in an uncultivated state so that the game which formed his meat supply could roam undisturbed over hills and plains which could support in comfort millions of people. It would insist that a God of bounty and love could never have intended that His gifts should be so wasted, and His providence so abused. It would show how the very virtues—if virtues they were—called for by a savage life, hardness, insensibility to pain and suffering, fierceness, made men more brutal and savage in their intercourse among themselves. From all these arguments and from others like them, reason would say that the red man had not justified his ownership of the soil and that he must yield its control to the white.

The appeal of the Indian orator, on the other hand, would depict a sylvan scene of hunting lodge or trapper’s camp. He would picture the primæval red man, erect, haughty, stern, proud, and possessed of all those virtues found so plentifully in Cooper’s novels—and so seldom anywhere else. He would show the simple qualities of the savage brain and the nobler traits which dwell among uncivilized peoples. He could construct a passionately moving appeal to the white man to allow this unlettered savage, his red brother, to remain upon the lands over which his fathers had hunted and where his tribal lodges had been pitched since “grass grew and water ran.” The first appeal would be an argument addressed to the hearer’s logical powers; the second would appeal to the hearer’s sentiment and emotion.

It must be remembered that often the most awful results follow some forms of persuasion, some appeals which do not aim at the higher motives but to passion and prejudice. The hateful story of many a mob shows the effect of persuasion addressed to the lowest instead of the higher instincts and emotions, but the persuasion had nothing to do with argument.

CHAPTER III
WHAT TO DEBATE

In the first place remember that you must debate something which is debatable, something which can be proved. Too many times a question is framed which could never in the reason of things be decided. For example, to refer to the Indian again, a question might be stated, “Resolved: that the treatment of the Indian by the white man has been unjust,” which could be decided after a reasonable discussion. The arguments, though general, would be of such a character that a more or less exact weighing could be had and a verdict taken. But if with the same kindly feeling for the oppressed and hatred of oppression, a question should be selected, “Resolved: that the Indian has suffered greater wrongs from the American government than has the negro,” you see, don’t you, how you could never arrive at a verdict? One side could only cite instance after instance where the Indian has suffered, and the other side could retaliate by exactly the same number of cases of wrongs the negro has suffered, and the scale would be even. Really a correct verdict could never be reached, for to be sure and certain, every wrong done to each race would have to be catalogued and weighed, and only omniscience could hope successfully to accomplish that result.

Take another illustration: “Resolved: that the works of nature are more beautiful than the works of art.” To the rainbow of the affirmative could be contrasted the electric fountain of the negative; to the Rock of Gibraltar would be offered Saint-Gaudens’ statue of Lincoln, and so on indefinitely. On the other hand you may so state your question that although the argument on both sides may consist largely of such a cataloguing of facts, those facts may so differ in their relations to the general question that one set will clearly outweigh the other. If you should suggest as a question, for example, “Resolved: that Amundson is a greater explorer than Peary,” I should say that the question is not a good one because of the suggestions I have just made; the debaters would simply balance the hardships of the Antarctic explorer against the trials of the Arctic traveler.

Now if the question is changed so that it would read, “Resolved: that the explorations of Amundson are more valuable to the world than those of Peary,” I should still say the question is bad, for the value of one ice field will simply be exchanged for that of another. But if the name of Stanley were to be substituted in the latter question for that of Amundson, so that the question would constitute a comparison of the respective values of arctic and equatorial exploration, it would open up a clear field for discussion. Whether the products of Africa are more valuable to the world than those of Greenland, whether the negroes mean more to the world than the Esquimaux, whether the scientific results are more valuable in the one case than in the other,—these propositions and others like them are open to argument and decision.

So, to use another illustration, if the question is, “Resolved: that a union of England and America would be beneficial to the world’s progress,” there is room for such clear and explicit reasoning on both sides that the arguments would be reasons and not simply a catalogue of unrelated facts.

Subjects Should Be Properly Limited.—Another rule valuable in the selection of a subject is that it should be properly limited so that too much is not attempted. This is really another way of stating the proposition that the exact boundaries of the question should be properly defined. For example, one might be greatly interested in the “Philippine question” but that as so stated could not be debated. What is the “Philippine question”? Has it to do with the broad proposition that the Anglo-Saxon race in general and that composite branch of the race residing in the United States in particular has had imposed upon it the police duty commonly regarded as the “White Man’s Burden”? Or is the question one of comparison between the respective values of life in the temperate and in the tropic zones?

Some particular branch of the question must be selected and matter outside of it rigorously put aside. If you should attempt to cover the whole subject, you could not properly discuss it in a dozen evenings, and if you should try to debate it in one evening without some restrictions, there would be such hopeless confusion that clear argument would be impossible.

Even if you get away from the general character of the subject implied in a loose statement of the question, you must still define its limits closely. For example, if your question reads, “Resolved: that the treatment of the Philippines by the United States has been unjust,” it sounds as if you had narrowed the question satisfactorily. You have taken it out of the domain of world civics and brought it home into national politics. But the question is still too indefinite. You may be talking about the original conquest of the Islands from the Spaniards, one of your partners in debate about the treatment of the Islanders themselves in the later wars, one of your opponents be speaking of the attitude of the United States toward the Islands in business and everyday life, and another of your opponents, of the alleged injustice on the part of the United States in not granting them independence. Any one of these interpretations would afford ample occupation for a whole evening, but you see that unless the question is properly restricted you would all be lost in hopeless confusion.

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.

Arrange your time and place and then decide upon the order in which you will speak. A very common procedure is:

No, a seven minutes’ speech is not very long but longer bursts of eloquence are likely to be tiresome. It is much better to have a short snappy debate full of interest and prevented from giving weariness by the constant change of speakers than to have ponderous proceedings. Moreover, in the schedule given above, fifty-two minutes is consumed, and that’s quite a while. Of course the number of contestants may vary and the time allotted each may be varied also.

Who shall preside? Well, if you have a club of your own, your president or in his absence, your vice-president, would naturally preside. If you should desire to pay some person a compliment, someone else may be asked, provided, of course, it was agreeable to the two officers who are by the rules of society work, entitled to that honor. If you have no formal organization, you can select anyone you choose. In doing so, you and your opponents would select someone who is dignified yet kindly, one who will not allow any “rough house” or boisterous conduct but who is respected by and fond of boys and who is, of course, absolutely fair.

Of course you must select your judges, generally three. Do not think, however, that it is an easy task to judge a debate. Choose no one as a judge who may have a personal prejudice for or against one of the speakers. If he is but indifferently or lazily honest, he is likely to favor his friend. If he is conscientious, he may in his very effort to be fair, and not lean toward his friend, lean the other way and really be unfair to him.

Choose as a judge no one who is known to have a prejudice on the question itself. The harassed judge must never forget that he is deciding on the merits of the debate, not on the merits of the question. He must weigh the arguments presented, paying no attention to other arguments, weighty to him, but left behind in the armory by the warring debater.

Because this task is so onerous and, indeed, so valuable in its training, it is an excellent plan to have members of your group—society, class or patrol or whatever it may be—act as judges. The practice in so weighing arguments and evidence will be invaluable to them when their time to debate comes around. In formal contests, however, you will call upon teachers, lawyers, ministers; men who are trained to think clearly and definitely and whose decision will mean something as fairly standing for the judgment of your community. For it is to this community judgment your real debate in life must appeal, and you must learn as soon as possible to aim at no less a tribunal.

So difficult is judging, that to the [Appendix], beginning on page 153, I have added a chapter designed to be helpful.

CHAPTER V
TERMS AND ISSUES

In getting ready, one of the most important steps is for you and your opponents to get together and talk over the question and agree beforehand on just what it covers and what it does not cover. You wish to avoid all confusion on these points, or at least you should wish to. Some men—and boys—think it smart to leave the question uncertain and indefinite so that—as they mistakenly suppose—they may increase their own chances of success. They feel that if they can only have a wide enough range in the discussion some of their arguments will probably hit the point and win their case for them. Too many times, however, the point at which they are aiming is the decision of the judges and not the logical and irresistible culmination of the argument.

The difference is like that between shooting with a shot gun and a rifle. In the first case if only your shot scatter enough you may bring down your game. In the second case, if your aim is true, you are sure to score a hit. The first case calls for a sense of general direction and not much more; the second calls for precision, accuracy, and its result should be inevitable.

An Understanding With Your Opponents.—By thus coming to an understanding with your opponents you will avoid confusion; you will reduce the proposition to its simplest terms, and you can narrow your own argument to a few clearly defined channels. You will, however, do much more than that: you will make the contest worth while by a manly agreement which will avoid any attempt to obscure the real question. You might be able so to becloud your opponents that you could possibly fool them as to your real essential points and so prevent an adequate reply. If you should succeed in so doing, although you might be able to “put it over” on your opponents and the judges of the debate, you would not be fair. Experienced judges, however, would probably detect your purpose and penalize you for it.

Not only is this determination of the essence of a question absolutely necessary in preparing for a debate; it prepares you for even more vital work in later life. Remember what we have said all along, that the real value of effective debating is its education for the unconscious exercise in later life of the mental habits thus acquired. So when in later life if you and those with whom you differ get together and talk over the terms of a question before you allow yourselves to debate the substance of that question, you will frequently find there is no question left for discussion. As you define this and that term, you will come nearer and nearer together. More times than not, you will find that you have so much in common, that you have nothing between you for disagreement. The question will always be simplified; many times it will disappear altogether.

If, however, someone should urge that you may be losing some of the educative value of debate by thus avoiding such subtleties and trickeries as I have just been condemning, let me remind you again, that the real value of agreement, whether in the debating club or in later and more real life, is not in just winning but in determining just what should be done. Your purpose to arrive at a correct course of action will be strengthened, not weakened, by clearing away the unnecessary and non-essential points at the beginning.

Remember, moreover, that to harmonize differences is as good mental training as to accentuate them; to eliminate them, as to crystallize them. To think constructively is a vastly more valuable mental habit than to think negatively. When you and your opponents think alike, whether in debate or real life, when you agree upon a certain part of the question between you, you have cleared the way for at least that much of constructive thought. Finally, such agreement is necessary to coöperation, and coöperation is absolutely essential to any action whether it is a trip to Mount Washington, a campaign against Philip of Macedon, or the carrying out of a certain policy toward the Philippines. We must work together or not at all. Some may pull at the load, some may push, but the load must go in one direction. To get the load anywhere you must have a common purpose; this simplification of the question will help you to find it. In debate, after the question has been defined and limited, you must present your arguments so clearly and conclusively that your opponent as well as your judges will agree that your course is wise and will be ready to follow the line of action that your conclusion calls for. Otherwise your opponents, if they be equally honest and efficient, in mind and method, have the right to demand the same surrender from you.

So, as the first step in your debate, get together, bar out the matter decided upon as outside of your debate, and settle the issues clearly. By the way, that step is the first in a law suit; when the issues are clearly defined, the actual trial takes very little time. A law suit is just one form of debate, and your debate must have its issues settled as clearly. In the Philippine question referred to on page 22 you would select some one of the four possible subjects and you would state it something like this, “Resolved: that the United States should grant the Philippines immediate independence;” now your issue is stated.

Don’t Try to Do It All Alone.—Before you begin your own personal work of preparation, you and your colleagues must meet and apportion the work among yourselves. Do not think you must cover all the ground yourself, unless of course, you are alone in the debate. No matter how many associates you have, however, you must have a broad general view of the whole subject but each one on your side must select some particular part of the subject which he alone will present.

Origin of the Question.—After these preliminaries are thus arranged and you start your own work, first analyze your question and find its starting point, which in any argument lies in the real or alleged existence of a human need. Certain evils are said to exist. The first step is to prove or disprove the existence of these evils. If they are shown to be facts, the next question and the first step in the argument is to show that a certain remedy will remove the evils.

Let us assume that the general question of conservation is prominent in the thought of your patrol, if you are a Scout, and you have decided to discuss it in your debates. Your scout life has kept you so much in the open and scoutcraft has so much to do with forestry, that the whole subject is of interest to you. Besides you realize that it is a question which really affects many public interests, and that its correct solution means a great deal to the whole country. You will first decide what branch of that subject you will consider. When you have decided to consider the conservation of forests alone, for example, you have at once removed a good deal which would otherwise have rendered your load heavy; you need not consider water power or coal fields or minerals of any kind and a host of such matters which under the general topic would have had an equal claim for attention.

Now that you have limited your question to forests, you first inquire what is really meant by conservation, why forests should be “conserved,” why should they be protected? Is there an evil which this form of conservation will remove? This is the starting point of your argument, for unless some one is complaining, or ought to complain, there is no need of discussing the matter at all. You will therefore first find out if anyone is complaining of evils growing out of the government’s policy towards its forests, or, if people are not complaining particularly, will the policy now enforced be likely to produce conditions which will work hardships and produce complaints? On the other hand, will these results happen if the present policy of the government is not followed? You see your argument must start somewhere and this starting point is found in some need which should be remedied. This is a process very similar to the work you accomplished when you were going over matters with your opponents. But it goes more into detail and it is concerned only with the question as it has finally been decided upon. It is equally necessary, however, and you cannot be too careful at this point if you would have the debate a thing of beautiful logic.

Definition of Terms.—After you have fixed and stated your starting point, you next define all doubtful terms. In a sense you thus mark out the channels for your debate, for your argument will flow steadily and unhampered if in the beginning you clear away any débris of misunderstood expressions or doubtful words. For example, if the form of your question is, “Resolved: that the present policy of the United States government toward forest conservation should be strengthened,” you would first define forests, then conservation, then the policy of the United States toward it, and finally what you mean by “strengthened.” Unless you define “forests,” for example, you may talk and think of a white pine forest in Idaho, your opponent may have in mind some cut over forests in Maine and their reforestration, and your audience and judges have still other tracts in mind. You may think it makes no difference what kind of forest is meant, what particular tracts of timber are understood. If so, all right; only say so in your definition. Make it clear just what you are talking about, an Idaho or Maine or North Carolina forest or all forests generally. Your definition of “conservation” will next follow, then your definition of the policy of the government toward it. This will be found by considering the actual laws governing forests and forest land and their enforcement and interpretation by the officials of the government administering those laws. Finally you will explain and define what you mean by “strengthen.” You see all such terms clearly defined are a long step ahead in your argument and, indeed, will often constitute the major part of the argument.

CHAPTER VI
CLASH OF ARGUMENTS

After you have determined your starting point and defined your terms, the next step—and an important one—is technically termed “the clash of arguments.” This phrase means a careful balancing over against each other of the leading arguments on both sides of the question.

Be sure you have both sides. It is even more important to know the strong sides of your opponent’s case and to be prepared to meet them than to know your own. It was frequently remarked of Lincoln in debate that he summed up his opponent’s case better than the opponent himself did. Lincoln could not have done so, had he not studied every side of his case. He put the arguments opposed to his own in their strongest possible light and prepared an exact answer. So you must do in your debate.

On your question, “Resolved: that the policy of the United States government toward conservation of forests should be strengthened,” the clash of arguments would follow some such form as this:

For another illustration, let us analyze the question popularly known as the recall of judicial decisions. We will assume that in the first place when your society and that rival society from Greenburg, after the debate was agreed upon, decided to discuss the recall, you got together to determine the exact question. You decided that you would not discuss the recall generally, that you did not care to go into the question of the wisdom of retiring legislators or executive officers before their term had expired. You were simply interested in the question as far as it affected judges. Very well.

When you discussed the matter further you found you were all unwilling to advocate any system which might seem to encourage an attack on the independence of the judiciary and so you agreed that the question should concern not the recall of judges but only the recall of judicial decisions. You felt that while the argument for and against the recall of judges generally would largely center about the necessity of preserving the independence of the judge, in the matter of submitting only his decisions to popular verdict, other considerations could be urged with equal effectiveness. You further felt that all his decisions should not thus be subjected to the people’s vote, but only those tending to construe the constitution, the fundamental law of the land. In this preliminary meeting you therefore narrowed the question down to a form something like this: “Resolved: that the decision of any judge affecting the constitutionality of any civil statute may be reversed by vote of the electors of the district affected by the statute.” Your clash of arguments on this question might read as follows:

Exclusion of Unessential Matter.—I do not pretend to have stated all the arguments pro and con on the question before you. I have illustrated simply to you a useful method of arranging them in your own preparation. As you balance them one against the other, you will see that some are important and vitally affect the main question, while others are comparatively unimportant and may be admitted as true or dismissed as trivial or entirely unrelated.

Almost every subject will suggest many arguments which must be admitted. Don’t waste your time in seeking to refute that which you can’t refute and which is not vital to your argument anyway. Your opponent will have a decided advantage over you when he shows the weakness of your attempt, and your main argument will surely suffer. A careful analysis will many times prevent just that trouble and on the other hand your opponent may carefully prepare himself to prove some proposition which you are perfectly willing to admit if you have anticipated his position and are prepared to show that it does not affect your main case.

The Vital Issues.—All these various steps in analysis are essential to good debating and if you have taken each step, you have now come to the last—the statement of the special issues. You have seen where the question originated, you have defined its terms, you have put yourself in the place of the other man and know about what he will say, you have excluded from the argument all non-essential matter, and there should now be left the real heart of the question, the actual proposition you are to debate. You can be very sure all this preliminary work is most important—if you have well considered all these steps, you have your debate half won.

In your introductory statement, you will give enough of your analysis to show why you present the points you select as essential. You need not state every step; in fact, in your formal speech, you should not let the machinery be too much in evidence, but in your preliminary work you cannot safely omit one step. So far everything has been preliminary to the argument itself, but you are now ready to build up your actual constructive argument.

In your presentation of your side of the conservation question, for instance, you will mass your facts and arguments about the few really essential points which are left for debate. You will not simply talk about the propositions. You will remember that each point must be proved. You will get not simply the opinions of someone else upon the question; you will get facts. For instance, in the question of the ownership of timber tracts, a part of the conservation problem, it will not be enough to cite what some one thinks about it, but get the actual number of acres owned by corporations. Is that enough? No, show the facts as to the relation of these corporations to one another, or the fact that there is no such relationship, as bearing on the fact of an ownership of these lands by one group. Not opinions, not theories, but facts are what win debates. After you have established your facts, then show how your facts prove your case.

Don’t Prove What Everybody Knows.—When you are considering the arrangement and proof, do not waste your time on proof of those facts which are either self-evident or taken for granted. For example, in your discussion of conservation you can take it as self-evident that the policy of the United States government is to aid the people of the United States. You can also take it for granted that the citizens of the United States are moved by love of country and love of home. No doubt you could indulge in some fine writing or fine speaking on these questions, but it is entirely unnecessary to do so. So you need not take time to prove that the government is not deliberately concocting a scheme to injure some of its citizens, nor need you stop to prove that the individual settler loves his forest home if “preëmpting” in good faith and that he should be aided. The mere statement of these two facts proves them.

CHAPTER VII
EVIDENCE

After you have marshaled the facts you wish to prove, you must consider the classes of evidence by which you wish to prove them.

In the first place there is the direct statement of the facts by witnesses, or the opinions of those witnesses who are qualified to speak as experts. Then there is circumstantial evidence, which consists of inferences fairly drawn from facts; in other words reasoning about facts. Thus if you wish to prove that cutting the forest off the northern part of the lower peninsula of Michigan has lessened the rainfall in that State, you could present three classes of testimony. You could bring forward an old resident who had known Michigan when it was wooded and when it was stripped of its timber; if from his own personal observation he could testify that as the timber was cut off the rainfall had diminished, that would be direct evidence of that fact. If you presented the statements of a scientist who would testify that when lands were stripped of their trees, there was less rainfall, his opinions would be entitled to consideration as proof of the facts just in the proportion that his observation and experience had been extended and at the same time exact.

Circumstantial Evidence.—If the cutting of the forests in Minnesota near the head waters of the Mississippi was under discussion, you might present the testimony of a man who lived on the banks of that river in Iowa, who had never seen Minnesota, but who could testify that the volume of water in the river had decreased from year to year in certain proportion. His testimony would be valuable as tending to establish your position, if you could also show that the cutting of the timber in Minnesota had proceeded in the same ratio as the decrease in the river’s volume. It would then be a fair inference that the two facts were so connected that one tended to prove the other.

The line, however, between direct and circumstantial evidence is very faint—one imperceptibly glides into the other. Indeed some experts insist that there is no such thing as direct evidence. They urge that all proof consists of deductions which may be so closely related to the fact to be established that a mere statement conclusively shows the causal relation. On the other hand this relation can frequently be shown only by the most delicate fitting together of all the links of circumstance. For example, suppose the testimony of A is that he saw B point a gun at C, that the gun was fired, that immediately C fell dead. His testimony would be, therefore, that B shot C and you, if you were on the jury, would perhaps feel justified in finding B guilty of murder—there would seem to be no doubt about it. But after all, his testimony is not direct evidence—even as simple and apparently as conclusive a statement as his might be explained away. Suppose, for example, an autopsy showed that C had heart disease and fell dead from that cause, and that the bullet penetrated C’s arm only. What to the observer would seem like irrefutable proof would be dissipated in a moment; it would be shown to be an unwarrantable deduction from certain circumstances.

Remember, however, that the value of evidence is in this ratio: that direct evidence of a witness who knows of his own knowledge and observation in the particular case is more to be trusted than expert evidence based on general observation, and that both are worth more than that evidence which is the result of deduction and inference.

Qualifications of Witnesses.—In weighing the value of the testimony offered to prove your facts—testimony is those statements of the witness which make up his evidence—you must ask him certain questions. If he were a witness in a law suit, the lawyers would bring out the points you must determine by four questions. Following their example, you will first ask “Is he honest or prejudiced?” In the conservation question considered, you would ask whether he was the agent of a lumber company whose statements would naturally be influenced by his selfish interest, or a homesteader who, since his only use for land was for farming purposes, would likely be as prejudiced the other way, or was he a banker or merchant who served both classes equally, whose interest lay equally with each party to the controversy?

You will next ask if his testimony is consistent with known facts. If he testified that the absence of trees had nothing to do with rainfall and had cited as proof of that alleged fact that there was a heavy rainfall in Sahara where there were no trees, you could at once dismiss him as an impossible witness because his statements as to Sahara were inconsistent with the known facts.

You should then inquire under what circumstances were the statements made: were they forced from him, were his relations such that he was a voluntary and willing witness endeavoring to assist investigation and find out the facts? If so, his testimony is probably valuable and worthy of credence.

Then in the last place, if the statements are made as those of an expert, the value of his testimony is in the exact ratio of his experience in the particular field discussed. Here is the opportunity for a very common error in argument. Frank in debating might have urged the opinion of Professor A or Doctor B, and Jack in his reply urged confidently the opinions of Judge C or General D as disposing of the evidence of Frank’s witnesses. But they would simply offset one opinion with another unless Jack could show that the judge and the general knew more about the subject matter than the professor and the doctor. Character or standing or position would avail nothing. In discussing conservation, for example, the opinion of the most eminent professor in a theological school or the greatest expert in running electric cars would not be received in questions of soil moisture or timber culture. It is not the standing of the man generally; it is his knowledge of the subject discussed, which makes his opinions acceptable as evidence. The evidence of a farmer or hunter or trapper, although unable to read or write, might outweigh that of the so-called expert.

Generalizations.—Next, in weighing circumstantial evidence, you will observe that there are three common forms in which it appears. There is first the generalization—very frequently the shape an expert’s opinion takes. If he says that timber tracts are worth so many dollars an acre as timber and so many dollars an acre as farms, his opinion is valuable or not depending upon what the basis of his judgment is. If it develops that he has observed many hundreds of such tracts of land, and that these different tracts lay in many different places, you safely conclude that his testimony, although a generalization, is sound because it is based upon wide observation. If he has inspected but very few such tracts, you conclude that his generalization is unsound, and worthless in helping you prove the facts.

Do not hesitate to apply the probe to the qualifications of your opponent’s expert, but be equally sure you establish the right of your own witness to speak as such. For example, I remember a case where the question involved was whether dehorning cattle was cruel within the meaning of a statute forbidding cruelty to animals. One side brought forward as expert professional witnesses certain surgeons eminent in their profession. They testified that the horn of the cow contained just under the hard bony shell a thin membranous structure, the extension of the periosteum, which was very sensitive to pain. They testified that they had known of cases where the shell of the horn had been removed by accident and this membrane exposed, whereupon the animals had given every manifestation of suffering excruciating pain. They argued from the sensitiveness of the periosteum, through these few instances of accident, to the deduction that dehorning cows, that is, sawing the horn off at right angles to this membrane, must also be extremely painful and hence cruel.

Opposed to these expert opinions of these surgeons based upon these few cases, were the opinions of farmers who did not pretend to have the scientific knowledge of the surgeons but who had dehorned many cows. They testified that they had seen but slight evidences of pain, that the animals had shown annoyance rather than distress, and had generally at once gone to eating. The farmers had no titles or university degrees; the experts had both, and supposedly in the very field of the debate—for that was what it was, although in a court of law. The superior qualifications of the plain unlettered farmers made their evidence of much greater value as expert testimony than the deductions of the expert gentlemen from the city.

Suppose you are discussing the adoption of a law prohibiting child labor. You can quote with confidence the opinion of a social worker whose daily duties keep her among operatives in mills. By her daily observation she is in a position to know the evil effects of labor on immature bodies and minds. So is the doctor or the teacher who sees these children daily. On the other hand, the farmer, who, although honest in his deduction from the results of his own labor, is not qualified because he himself worked as a boy on a farm to speak understandingly of the effects of child labor in mills or factories. He must confine his testimony to the effect of child labor on the farm. Nor is the woman who knows nothing of labor on farm or in factory qualified to speak at all, sentimentally aroused as she may be, unless she can show observation of conditions herself or the intelligent study of the well founded opinions of others.

Cause and Effect.—Then again there is in circumstantial evidence the inference you draw from the relation of cause and effect. To use a very familiar example: Suppose you pass a piece of ground where to your knowledge there stood but a very few weeks before a heavy growth of timber and observe that the trees are gone. If you see piles of freshly sawed lumber, you can argue that the trees have been cut by man; if on the other hand you see bent and torn trees, you can as surely reason that a cyclone has visited that neighborhood. In each case you argue from effect back to cause. This seems very simple, but is often a very treacherous argument, for the alleged cause may be entirely inadequate or may be so involved with other unrecognized causes that the deduction you make is not warranted. You must examine the connection very carefully and make sure that it is a causal relation and not a casual one.

Argument from Resemblance.—Then there is the argument from resemblance, which is simply another form of causal relationship. The argument, for example, would run that conservation must surely be a good thing for the United States because it was a good thing for New Zealand. That conclusion is sound if the conditions in the two countries are the same, but not otherwise; and it is upon this rock of difference in conditions that arguments from resemblance so often split. Watch them. The same rule may not apply to reforestration in Idaho as in Maine, for instance, because conditions are dissimilar in many respects.

If you carefully study these forms of argument, and can estimate the value of opinions and circumstantial evidence, you will not only be able to build up a bomb proof argument of your own but you will be able to detect fallacies in your opponent’s discussion. When you have mastered the one branch of the case you are equipped to meet the other, for the two are identical.

CHAPTER VIII
THE BRIEF

Suppose you have decided to debate one phase of the child labor problem, and your question reads something like this: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen years should be allowed to work in factories.” You see the question omits all discussion of child labor on the farm, for instance, or in the street trades, or in any occupation except those within doors under factory conditions. You will see, also, that before you begin your actual analysis, you and your opponents must agree on what you mean by “factories”—just what kind of manufacturing establishments you have in mind. Otherwise you would be compelled to define them more carefully in the question itself as you stated it.

For two reasons, you need the “brief” at this stage of your analysis. To discuss the least important one first—you should inform your critical friend or teacher as to just what your argument is. You must tell him what are the bones of the skeleton, indicate their arrangement, and show them to him without the beautiful covering of flesh and skin to be given them by your charming diction and eloquence. The bones may not be properly articulated at all—what, when clothed with the flesh and muscle of your finished debate, may seem like a strong right arm adequately equipped with biceps and all the rest of the blow delivering agencies may not be properly joined at the shoulder and hence fail utterly, when the test comes. So let your friendly critic—your specialist in this kind of anatomy—see just what you have and how your various arguments hang together.

But more important than to satisfy your critic is it carefully to formulate your argument for your own benefit in thinking through your proposition. As you think about your question, various considerations will suggest themselves to you. Some you will recognize as arguments of first rank—as indispensable to your case. Others will take a subordinate place; still others serve as mere illustrations or arguments from resemblance. Finally, however, your logical sequence will emerge, and you will have a structure which will be logical throughout, with every part fitting into every other part and pointing to an irresistible conclusion.

The name given to it well defines this formulation of your argument. It is your argument but in brief. Every essential to your full argument must be there. But take other warning from that name. In form don’t let it be too brief. It is not enough to sprinkle hints over the page, hints which may be fairly intelligible to you but be meaningless to another. Remember that critic of yours who will look over your brief. Don’t make it superficial or arrange your arguments in casual instead of causal sequence. Besides, you may find in practice that a word which to-day, as you put it down on paper, hot from your thinking machine, means everything to you and is the key word to a weighty argument, to-morrow or next week will have lost its cunning and mean anything or nothing to you.

So not only for the benefit of your critic but especially for the value of the exercise to yourself, reduce your argument to definite formal organization. You will be paid in the long run. You may have such a command of yourself and your thinking that you can carry all this organization in your head without any brief—but most of us can’t. Moreover, you will find that putting these arguments down in black and white before you and then arranging them in causal logical sequence will aid your thinking immensely. Thoughts which were dim and misty, which were without form and substance, will fall into order and assume a relation to the whole subject unseen before.

You will also find that by a simple system of symbols you will aid this clarifying process. Propositions of equal dignity and rank will be introduced by equivalent symbols and thus their relationship automatically indicated. No, of course not—it is not necessary to go through this process. You may get through many debates without using any of these aids—mechanical, if you please. But they are useful and have been used by hundreds of debaters. Don’t you think it is a little foolish to insist on swimming the river and demonstrating your power in that way, when there is available a very comfortable bridge that hundreds have used to their great convenience?

One other observation about the form of this “brief.” It should be so arranged that, using the words “for” or “because” to introduce your arguments, you will have a complete clause, with subject and predicate. You will note that clauses occur in the brief given below. I have connected them with their proper prepositions.

Subdivision I gives us: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor is unnecessary, for there is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to the demands of factory work.”

II. 1. A. gives us this sentence: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor injures the child’s health, for confinement within the building, under the conditions of factory employment, checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.” So II. 1. B. gives a second sentence like the one last quoted except that its last portion differs as the subordinate argument differs. That reads: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor injures the child’s health, for normal physical development demands out-of-doors activity and freedom from the strain of factory work.”

Let me hint, too, that frequently after you have arranged what seems to be a perfect logical argument, if from under each head you remove the proof and connect the various sequences so that you form one sentence, you will find that it is not logical and must be arranged all over again.

Speaking of proof—in your proof under each subdivision you must set down the facts you expect to use to support your contentions. For example, under II. 2. A. b. it would not be sufficient to say in your brief “instances” or “illustrations” but:

“The report of Massachusetts Board of Education says: ‘The fact that 41.3 per cent. of those employed in the textile industry [speaking of a group out of school six years] receive less than $8 a week accounts, in large part, for the idleness among boys from eighteen to twenty-one years of age. There is no system of training in the mill which fits those on low paid, unskilled work, for the skilled work of the mill. Only 21 per cent. of the textile workers who have been in the business six years earn $10 or more, and a negligible percentage of those who work in candy factories earn this amount. Only 21 per cent. of the shoe workers earn less than $10 a week at six years out.... Monotonous work, especially that which requires great speed and uses up nervous energy, should not be done for any long period by young people under eighteen years of age, and the years up to this time should be spent in physical and mental upbuilding in preparation for the years of industrial life to come.’”

“A recent investigation of the Federal Bureau of Labor declares of a certain number of children under sixteen years who left school to work, that 90 per cent. entered industries in which the wages of adults were $10 a week or less. A vocational survey in New York exhibits in one group one hundred and one boys between fourteen and sixteen years and an analysis of the work they are doing. In only five cases was there any opportunity for them to advance or improve; ninety-six were in dead end occupations.”

“One woman, in Georgia, thirty-four years of age, but looking fifty, told me she had gone to the mill when she was nine years of age, and had been there ever since. She hated the very thought of working in the mill and from all appearances was ready for the scrap heap. She said when she was nine years old nothing could have kept her out of the mill and for two or three years after that she said she always listened for the whistle to blow so that she could go to work and it never blew too early for her. She said she wished she could get now where she could never hear the whistle blow. She makes about ninety cents per day when she works.”

“The boys [in Beverly, Massachusetts, where vocational education is provided] come from the common schools. Reports show that they are sons of clerks, shopkeepers, shoemakers, tailors, chauffeurs, laborers, machinists and other workmen. A boy’s earning capacity in Beverly is liberally estimated at $6 a week, which capitalized on a 5 per cent. a year basis represents a working capital value of $6,000 a year. The wage earning capacity of boys, after two and a half or three years of this public schooling, is $15 to $18 a week. Capitalized on a 5 per cent. basis, this shows the marvelous increase from $6,000 to $15,000 to $18,000 a year working capital.

“But the boy here is only on the threshold. Another set of figures is interesting. Professor James M. Dodge, president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in his notable and elaborate formula, finds that the average untrained worker in this country reaches his maximum of earning at twenty-three years of age, the average then being $15 a week. The future of the untrained beyond this becomes precarious. They are in ‘blind alleys’ and ‘no-thoroughfare’ work. Only 5 per cent. rise above the level, 35 per cent. remain in employ, 20 per cent. leave the work of their own accord, and 40 per cent. are dismissed. Here at seventeen and a half years or eighteen, the vocationally educated pupil of the Beverly school has a capitalized value of $15,000 to $18,000.”

I will now illustrate what I have said by briefing the question before us. Such a brief would read something like this:

Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories.

I. It is unnecessary, for

There is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to the demands of factory work.

II. Such labor injures the child, for

1. It is injurious to his health, for

A. Confinement within the building, under the conditions of factory employment, checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.

B. Normal physical development demands out-of-doors activity and freedom from the strain of factory work.

2. It is injurious to his mind and education, for

A. The child needs the years just before sixteen for

a. general culture

b. specific vocational training.

B. The monotony and excessive strain of work in factories tends to

a. impair the mental powers, particularly those of young children

b. render them indifferent to subjects of general interest and educational value.

3. It impairs the efficiency of the child, for

A. During the years when he should be absorbing knowledge which would prepare him for life, he is prevented from doing so, and, when of adult age, finds himself

a. without that suppleness of fingers which has been assumed to be the warrant for employing him, and thus, too old and too large longer to do child’s work; and

b. with neither education nor training to do the work of an adult.

III. Such labor injures the State, for

1. Children who are forced to work under factory conditions are undeveloped physically and mentally and

A. Do not make good citizens

B. Cannot afterward be the parents of good citizens

C. Are prematurely aged, and “scrapped” at an early age, thus imposing a burden of support upon the State.

2. Adult laborers, with their dependents, whose welfare is necessary to that of the State, suffer hardship, because

A. The use of child labor, obviously a substitute for adult labor, will

a. deprive adults of work, or

b. force their wages down to those of children.

3. It creates an idle class, which is always a menace to the State, because it

A. Throws the child out of employment because of inefficiency when he becomes an adult.

B. Throws the adult out of employment because of the competition of child labor.

Is the ground covered? Is it logical? Is any step taken for granted?

Remember each position must be supported by proof, and your brief must set out the evidence you expect to use in your argument. The nature of that proof may vary, however. For example, suppose you were proving proposition II. 1. A., which properly set out at length would read: “No child below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in a factory, for such labor injures the child’s health because confinement within the building under the conditions of factory employment checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.”

That proposition might be proved in a number of ways. (Remember now what we discussed in the chapter on evidence and read that chapter over again in connection with this discussion.) You could prove it first by the testimony of those who are familiar with children so employed; second, by statistics of mortality and morbidity among children so employed; third, by testimony of experts—like physicians—as to probable results of such employment because of probable effect of conditions named upon bodily organs and their functions.

Here are some specific facts testified to in a legislative hearing on the question of child labor in mills—factories. They are all admissible as testimony from the first class of witnesses (those familiar with children so employed) under the principles laid down in the chapter on evidence.

A French boy of fifteen was asked if he preferred ten hours to eight hours. “Oh no, ten hours is too long; it seems as though I never would see the afternoon go by.” The mill work showed its effect upon his pale, drawn face. He was tired out by it.

A pretty little French girl, fourteen years old, who had worked in the mill a few months at two or three dollars a week, had good reasons for her dislike of mill work. Getting up at 5.30 for a ten-hour day, standing nearly all the time, watching the threads so closely that her head ached, she was frequently sick. She had been replaced by an adult on September first, and since that time had been at home doing housework. Her health had improved greatly in the ten weeks, and when the investigators saw her, she had good color and got chance enough to play so that she was, as her mother said, much better off than in the mill.

A heavy-eyed, dull looking boy of fifteen was sent back to school as a result of the new law. He preferred to work, but he had not succeeded in securing an eight-hour job. He happened to live near the place in which the investigator stayed and there was good opportunity to watch the effect of the law on him from week to week. At the end of a month he had become noticeably lively and bright.

Robert Hunter tells us of a vagrant he once knew who “had for years—from the day he was eleven until the day he was sixteen—made two movements of his hands each second, or 23,760,000 mechanical movements each year, and was at the time I knew him,” says Hunter, “at the age of thirty-five, broken down, drunken and diseased, but he still remembered this period of slavery sufficiently well to tell me that he had ‘paid up’ for all the sins he had ever committed ‘by those five years in hell.’”

“As State Factory Inspector of Alabama, my attention has been called very forcibly to the child labor conditions in that State, and, as a vast majority of the child laborers are in the cotton mills and textile manufactories, I will confine my remarks to the cotton mill children.

“The health of the mill operatives is what one would expect. It varies in different mills. In certain localities the hookworm is pictured on the faces of nearly all the children. Red blood is conspicuous by its absence. The trained eye of the inspector is often unable to tell whether the age of a weazened, dried-up, anæmic specimen of the genus homo is twelve or eighteen.”

You can see how then each proposition of your argument must be supported by adequate evidence. I don’t intend to carry the illustrations further.

The amount of evidence you produce will be governed largely by where the burden of proof lies. That is rather a mysterious expression and often debaters spend a great deal of energy in trying to shift or dodge something they are not quite sure about, but they are sure it is something awful. It is really a very simple thing—its meaning is only that he who asserts must prove. If I say a certain thing is so, I must prove it. I cannot expect or ask you to prove that it is not so. Do you see the point? If you say it is 444 miles from Pecatonica to Readville, you must prove it is just 444 miles. You must bring up a surveyor or a table of distances of recognized authority or show in some authoritative way that you are correct. If you have made the definite statement you must prove it in a way equally definite—it’s no concern of mine to show that it is 445 miles or only five miles.

You will notice that this brief contains two classes of arguments—one which seems to anticipate possible contentions of the other side and the other which brings forward positive and direct contentions. The first class can best be catalogued as rebuttal and refutation and will be considered in the next chapter.

Some arguments, however, although of the nature of refutation of possible positions of your opponents may often be well introduced in the beginning of your main argument. For example, Proposition I: “Child labor is unnecessary for there is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to the demands of factory work” is practically an answer to a possible argument of your opponent that child labor is necessary because some mills could not run without it. Suppose he had prepared himself with an elaborate argument to prove his position and you had knowingly or unknowingly anticipated his effort and established the opposite, he would find himself in a very awkward position. He would talk to an audience—or judge—already convinced by your arguments, or he would be compelled at least to destroy the force of your arguments before he could hope to implant his own in their place.

I only refer to this class of argument to show how your brief will contain the full body of your argument so that you will have all your tools ready and sharpened for your use. When you actually get to work, you may not use all of them after all. But if you find your opponent presents a tough, knotty problem for you to saw, your implement is ready. If it is only a pine lath of course a very different tool may be ample. But you will be ready and as you grow experienced in debate your facility will be shown in the ease with which you select now this, now that tool, or discard both of them.

CHAPTER IX
REFUTATION

Not only will your careful analysis of the question formulate your own argument, but it will prepare you to refute that of your opponent. Put just as much care into this part of your preparation as into any other. State to yourself his probable points just as strongly and clearly as you can. If you can put his case better than he, when you come to your refutation, so much the better, provided you are equipped to answer adequately. Of course you can’t spend time enough to answer every point he has made—make up your mind which are the essential ones and strike at them. This selection will be comparatively simple if you have properly analyzed your question in the first place, but will be impossible if you have slighted that part of your work.

Do not be misled, however, into thinking that refutation itself is easy or of slight importance. It is neither. It calls for the exercise of all of your skill in selecting the essentials and ignoring the non-essentials. The young debater, moreover, is often impaled upon one or the other horn of the dilemma—too much or too little. If you see no side of the case but your own, your beautifully constructed argument may fall to pieces when your opponent, perhaps using some unpretentious fact which you, in your innocence, had entirely overlooked, knocks out the keystone of your arch of logic and your structure falls to ruin. On the other hand, you may demolish one after the other of your opponent’s positions and yet present no counter claims for your own side of the case. If you prove your opponent to be all wrong, you do not thereby prove yourself all right. You must establish your own position and not content yourself merely with destroying that of your enemy—you must be constructive as well as destructive.

Here again the analogy between debate and the later debate of life runs close and sure. The man who in the activity of his group—whether his lodge, his club, his society, his church, his city, or his State—has nothing but criticism to offer is of but little value. It is easy to say “you can’t, you can’t.” Such a statement is as valueless as it is easy.

One most important tactical reason for a constructive argument of your own is that you can never tell whether you have destroyed all of the enemy’s bridges. One forgotten approach may turn the position you fancied was impregnable into a trap from which there is no escape. You must remember further that in debate the question is as a rule a comparative one only; neither side is wholly in the right. For example when the case as stated lay between Peary and Amundson, or between Peary and Stanley, if you content yourself with disproving the claims of Amundson or Stanley without establishing the rights of Peary, you might so discredit the whole argument that to the mind of your judges the fame of some unnamed third person like Livingstone, or Du Chaillu or Kane or even Dr. Cook might intervene to give the decision to your opponent.

The skillful debater will, therefore, develop his campaign along two parallel lines; he will demolish the defenses of his enemy with one battery of arguments while he is advancing his own position with another arm of the service marching under the flag labeled Q. E. D.

The place of refutation in your argument, although essential, cannot be dictated. It will depend largely upon the course the debate takes. I can make certain useful suggestions, however.

Obviously you cannot refute until there is something to refute. If your audience—and your judges—is entirely impartial and unprejudiced, if you do not have to combat a preconceived position, you can probably safely content yourself with advancing your own position and leave the rebuttal of your opponent’s arguments until later. But if you are presenting some novel proposition or some unpopular idea which cannot be entertained unless certain hostile ideas are cleared away, you will win better attention if you demolish the fundamental ideas upon which the old theory rests before you present your constructive argument.

Rebuttal.—In rebuttal—which is simply refutation in action—you can readily give to your whole debate, or at least your side of it, a unity which might otherwise be lacking. You relate your work to the work of your comrades and to that of your opponents. You select his strong points; you minimize his weak ones. You shape his position into that form which best suits your views while at the same time you are advancing to your own attack. But to carry the military figure a little further, while you must therefore be prepared with a thorough knowledge of your opponent’s defenses, of his equipment of arguments, and, if possible, of facts, while you should have almost a foreknowledge of his probable lines of approach, you must always be capable of a quick shifting of your own position as he in turn varies his attack upon you. For be sure he will not be content to stand up and be fired at—you must be alert and resourceful and ready to meet any change of front on his part. The skillful debater will not be content unless he is prepared to meet any attack which may be made upon him.

Be sure, however, to have yourself so well in hand that your refutation will be as well organized as your constructive argument. More than that, you should not allow any acute break to appear between the two. What happened in a recent college debate in the East is an excellent demonstration of what should not be done. Neither the audience nor the judges had been told what was coming, and all were surprised when four minutes after each speaker began (he had twelve minutes in all) a bell rang. Instantly over the face of the speaker, as one of the judges told me, came a sort of “Thank Heaven” expression, and he forthwith swung off into a well-prepared argument on the constructive side of the case. Evidently each had been told to rebut for four minutes and then argue. To be sure that he would know where to stop the one and begin the other, the bell signal was arranged. The effect was ludicrous in the extreme.

There are four special kinds of rebuttal which you can use.

Reductio ad Absurdum.—If, for illustration, your opponent, in debating the question of child labor, insists that there is a certain nimbleness and quickness of the fingers in children which is necessary to the performance of certain industrial processes, you can well answer that if that is true of children of from fourteen to sixteen it is obviously more true of the age twelve to fourteen and so children of that age should be employed. If this deduction follows, you can argue, then it must be equally true of age ten to twelve and so on even to younger ages yet. If your opponent should question the soundness of this deduction, you could still further confound him by replying that when the employment of children of those ages was under discussion, those identical arguments were advanced in its support.

Enforcing the Consequences.—If, for example, in discussing conservation, if your opponent insists that a free and unrestricted cutting of timber should be allowed, you can show the result of such complete liberty, if carried to its logical results—the denuding of the United States of all its timber. It is not necessary, in urging either this form of rebuttal nor the one which has just preceded it, that the result be probable. It is enough for the result to be possible.

The Dilemma.—In this method of refutation you show your opponent has only two arguments to advance, that neither of them is true and that therefore his case falls unproved. No better illustration of the effectiveness of this method can be given than a reference to the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates. You will remember that Douglas declared he believed both in squatter sovereignty and in the Dred Scott decision. The one said that the people of any territory had the right to decide for themselves whether they would or would not exclude slavery, while the Dred Scott decision meant that a slaveholder could recover his slave in any territory into which he might escape. You see the two positions are logically inconsistent. When, therefore, Lincoln asked Douglas as he did in these debates, this question, “Can the people of a territory, prior to the formation of a state constitution, in any lawful way exclude slavery?” Douglas was compelled to face a perfect dilemma. If he answered “yes” he would repudiate the Dred Scott decision—he wanted the support of the South. If he answered “no,” he would repudiate the doctrine of squatter sovereignty and offend the North. In endeavoring to meet the difficulty, he maintained that while a territory could not exclude slavery it could legally enact such unfriendly legislation that it would be impossible for slavery to remain. Lincoln practically had Douglas defeated before the judges of that debate—the American people—when he showed the absurdity of Douglas’ attempted escape from his dilemma. Lincoln showed that in effect Douglas said that slavery could lawfully be excluded from a place where it had a lawful right to be. The debate—and this famous “dilemma” was the spectacular part of it—made Lincoln president.

Residues.—This method is simply an enlargement of the difficulties of the dilemma. When more than two possibilities are presented and you demolish one after the other of them your hope is that nothing may be left of his case—that the residuum may be zero.

Analyze Your Opponent’s Case.—As your opponent is speaking, note his points with care. Apply to them the principles we have discussed in earlier chapters.

Is his reasoning based upon premises which you can disprove?

Has he ignored the real issue?

Are his alleged causes merely coincidences, or are there other contributing causes which lessen the force of his conclusion?

Is his observation of facts faulty and are his generalizations unsound and based upon insufficient and unfair instances?

Apply these tests to his arguments and you will render your task of refutation easier. But in your refutation, be sure you refute. Don’t think for a minute that either heat or violence or sarcasm is a good answer. Neither can the testimony of one witness be rebutted by that of another unless the latter’s knowledge of the matter is shown to be the greater. And the strength of refutation lies in the skill with which you make your audience believe your witnesses are more worthy of belief than those of your opponent, provided always that is the fact.

CHAPTER X
DELIVERY

Let your speech have form and body. When you have prepared your brief, you have indeed articulated a skeleton which may be beautiful in its logical symmetry although not as yet clothed in flesh and blood. But do not destroy that beauty by losing, when you begin to speak, all your sense of form and arrangement. Do not let your spoken argument be simply unrelated chunks of thought. Keep your transitions in thought clear. I do not mean that you should parade each step consciously before your audience and label each section neatly and appropriately. Let your argument all travel forward to a climactic end. “Many speakers approach the end of their work as if it were a dreaded leap into oblivion, and, after trying again and again to close, end abruptly or trail off in less and less audible sentences till the gavel falls.”

As to your method of delivery, as to how to learn to speak, the best advice I can give you is to learn to speak by speaking. Don’t try to force your voice or your gestures; let them both be easy and natural. The human voice is capable of wonderful things; its tones may be rich and mellow or harsh and rasping. Learn to listen to your own voice as to that of another.

Breathing.—The secret of successful public speaking is to use your voice from the diaphragm up, not from the throat. By that statement, I mean that you should do your talking with a column of vibrating air the base of which rests upon the muscles at the base of the lungs. You must, then, breathe deeply, filling the lower portion of the lungs. Let the great muscles of the diaphragm push forth your voice; do not try to crowd it out by using those of the upper part of the chest. Hold your chest motionless. The skillful speaker can fill a vast auditorium with a rich resonant voice—and, all the time, keep the upper chest muscles inactive, the upper parts of the chest motionless.

For the speaker’s chest to rise and fall, for him to squeeze his chest together as he might squeeze an orange, may show emotion, but it doesn’t show good sense. If you use the muscles of the throat and neck, you will soon injure your voice; to speak effectively, you must let the lower part of the lungs do the work. It will, if it is given half a chance.

These directions may seem to call for a difficult feat of internal gymnastics. They don’t. Correct breathing is easier than the other sort!

You will be surprised to find vocal powers which you never realized existed before. You will also be chagrined to find, I fear, that you occasionally use tones which rasp and grate, which strain the muscles, parch the throat and distress generally not only the speaker but alas! the hearer as well. Cultivate those tones which are flexible and resonant and discard those which grate and strain. Use your singing tones and don’t be afraid to open your mouth and let your voice have a chance.

But don’t get monotonous in your work. You will find, in practice, many rich mellow tones of many keys and pitches. Just because one sounds good to you—and it may be everything you think it is—don’t use it to the point of monotony. I heard a lady read some charming verse of her own composition the other evening. The poems were in every way pleasing—they were much above the ordinary. But she pitched her voice in one key and one tone all the way through the verse, her comment, her introduction, everything, all in the same tone from beginning to end! The effect was marred. There was no break in the smooth voice from start to finish. As one of her hearers remarked: “I could stand those canary bird tones in the verses but she should have given us a rest in the rest of it.”

As to your gestures and your bearing on the platform, the same rule applies; be easy and natural. Remember that after all, speaking is little more than talking. If you can assist your public speech by gestures which help your meaning, emphasizing certain points or, as it were, marking off certain phrases, why, gesture. But don’t wave your arms for the mere sake of doing so. As one teacher of debating said “You may do anything on the platform you would do anywhere else in the company of ladies and gentlemen.” You must of course so conduct yourself physically that you will not distract the attention of your audience from what you are saying; you wish to help your thought, not hinder it.

But always be yourself—be natural. It is better to be a real William Smith or even a real Bill Smith than an imitation Daniel Webster. Study Webster and Calhoun and Root and Bryan. Get all the illustrations and aid you can from their methods in debate; but remember after all you must be yourself. When you were created the mold was thrown away. No two natures are alike, no two persons have the same powers. You can’t be someone else if you want to be.

CHAPTER XI
FINAL SUGGESTIONS

The way to learn to debate is by actual practice in debate. The way to learn to speak is by trying to speak. Never miss a proper opportunity of speaking. Don’t make yourself disliked, of course, but try every chance you get, and listen to every debate or speech you can and apply to every argument you hear or read the tests which show whether they are real or false. Before you really know it, you will prove every proposition presented to you and that without any conscious effort.

One excellent form of practice is in audibly talking a thing out to yourself. Haven’t you noticed many times you have had a thought which seemed decidedly clear and worth while to yourself but which seemed misty and inconclusive when you tried to tell your friend about it? You know some say that a thought is not entitled to cataloguing as a thought until it has been expressed in words; that until that time it may have within it the germ of an idea but it is not really a thought until it has been clothed in an appropriate dress of language. However that may be, you certainly want to express your thoughts clearly and directly; you wish to convince your hearers of the soundness of your position.

Again, many boys who can write clearly and beautifully are likely to become slangy and colloquial when they talk. If you practice clothing your thoughts in appropriate audible language you will easily detect this trouble and it will soon become offensive to you. So, for both of these reasons, don’t be afraid to talk to yourself. Never mind if you are overheard and pronounced queer—it’s all in the day’s work.

In the next place, remember that all argument is really plain exposition—that is, you are simply setting forth the facts and “applying to them an explanation; a theory or a policy better or more rational, more thorough or more for your personal advantage.” The rules which I have given you will aid you in thus setting forth the facts, and in making your audience see your proposed solution of those facts.

But as I said before, the way to learn to debate is to debate. The rest of this book is made up of practical suggestions which will help you and your crowd to organize and conduct debates and debating societies. Go to it, but go to it as a real thing, a thing worth while and not a mere game. Take yourselves seriously and apply to your informal talks and discussions the rules I have been outlining for formal debates. I don’t want you to be stilted or stiff, nor yet self-conscious prigs, but I want you to realize that your life now, in your club or society or patrol, is but a cross-section of what your later life will be. The same rules govern your mental discipline now as will then. The lessons you learn now you will not have to learn then and, what is of far more consequence, if you now look after your training a little, you won’t have a lot of things to unlearn then. I have two suggestions, however, which apply with equal force to both times—now and later.

If you are not successful in your argument, what shall you do? If the judges in the debate decide against you, what next? If your opponent instead of yourself has succeeded in rousing your hearers to the point of action, shall you sulk in your tent like Achilles or shall you turn in and help? By all means the latter, unless there is some moral principle involved. In active life, men are too willing to feel absolved from all responsibility unless their own special programme is adopted. They will often admit that the other course of action is all right as far as it goes, only because it does not go far enough they decline to have anything to do with it.

Don’t make this mistake yourself. If your patrol decides to go to Mount Washington when you wanted to go to the Thousand Islands, never mind; go anyway. If you wanted the age limit against child labor fixed at sixteen and your opponent is successful in making it fifteen, why remember fifteen is better than fourteen anyway. If you wanted forest reserves of twenty million acres established by law, and your opponent succeeded in convincing the judges that ten millions was about right, that’s better than no conservation at all. Or for example if you believe that nation wide prohibition of the liquor traffic is the ultimate solution of that problem, you should not therefore decline to have anything to do with state prohibition or even local option. They are all steps in the right direction, don’t you see? Take anything you can get. The step in the right direction is the right step, whether it is a short step or a long step.

Finally, remember that while these suggestions are designed to aid you win your debate, in the nature of things, there can only be one correct position on any question. One side only can be right, and if your side is not right it should not win. But it is equally true if both sides are careful in their analysis of the question, and in their discussion of it, it is much more likely that the actual facts will be discovered and a correct solution of the difficulties found. You must therefore remember that it is your task to do the best you can so to present your side of the case that every argument to be brought forward on your side will have its just weight. But do not think that because you have a certain side of an argument to present you must always thereafter take that side of the case. In other words don’t be afraid of changing your mind. Give the best work you are capable of in preparing and presenting your arguments and then sit in judgment yourself upon yourself. Be your own severest critic, and be manly enough to abide by the result.

CHAPTER XII
HOW THE FAIRFIELD BOYS ORGANIZED

I knew several of the boys at Fairfield, and because I was much interested in debating generally, I was delighted when Jack Mason asked me if I would like to go with him to a meeting called to discuss the organization of a debating club. Jack was a fine lad about seventeen years old; he was an enthusiastic ball player and delighted in outdoor sports. His particular chum, Frank Lawrence, was a different lad. He found his chief interest in books and reading, although he was by no means a “dig” or a recluse. However, the two boys made a fine team, and each supplied what the other may have lacked.

Frank was really the leader in the movement to organize the club. He had been reading several volumes of orations and had been impressed by the force and vigor of the great speakers. Like all boys who amount to anything, he wanted to try his hand, and naturally he didn’t want to do it alone. He took the matter up with Jack and, while Jack at first laughed at the idea, Frank finally brought him round to see it was a good thing. The result was that fifteen or twenty of the boys came together to talk things over.

When I arrived I found just a crowd of ordinary boys, no better or no worse than average lads in a community. They all wanted to do something; they were not satisfied with waiting for something to happen; they wanted to make something happen. With that spirit in them, they speedily got down to work and before I realized it they had organized their club.

Some of the boys were Scouts and naturally preferred to have that organization connected in some way with the club. Jack, I think, approved this idea, but Frank pointed out that although many of them were Scouts and all of them had friends who were Scouts, this really was not a scout organization and they might wish to take into the club boys who possibly did not believe in the scout organization, and might thus be prevented from joining. Charlie Taylor suggested that it be called “The Debating Club of the Epworth League.” Charlie was a Methodist and belonged to the Epworth League. George Perkins, however, who was an ardent member of the Christian Endeavor Society, objected, and of course when the proposal was put that way, Charlie at once saw that it was not fair. The boys finally agreed that the only thing they had in common, as far as the organization of the club was concerned, was first, that they were boys, and second, that they wanted to debate. Therefore, they decided to call it by a name which would, by its very simplicity, avoid any misunderstanding and at the same time properly characterize the object of the club. They decided therefore to call the club “The Boys’ Debating Club of Fairfield.”

When they came formally to state the purpose of their organization, after some discussion they agreed upon this preamble: “We, the undersigned, appreciating the advantages to be derived from practice in debate, hereby organize ourselves into a club for that purpose and agree to be governed by the following constitution:”

Frank wished to have more in this preamble and urged that they write it so that it would state that they would be benefited by drill in discussion, in composition, in declamation, in elocution, in parliamentary practice; in fact, in many other ways growing out of their meeting as a club, but Henry Jordan, a quiet, unassuming member, asked if all that really was not included in the word “debate.” They said, “Of course,” and so the short preamble stood.

The first few articles were adopted without much discussion, as they all thought substantially alike on those points.

The question of a short term of office called forth much discussion. My friend Jack is decidedly businesslike and he could see no real reason, he said, for going through the fuss and bother of so many elections. “If a man makes a good president,” he said, “why do we want to put him out of office after he has been working ten weeks and has just got the run of things? Besides, he would scarcely have time to show what he could do in ten weeks.” Frank replied: “Suppose he doesn’t make a good president; even these ten weeks would be a pretty long time, wouldn’t it?” Jack grumbled a good deal and insisted that the boys would put in most of their time electioneering for office. The boys laughed him down on this point, but Henry Jordan convinced them all when he said: “If practice is what we are after in this club, the more the offices are passed around the more practice we will all get.” They decided to fill vacancies by election at any meeting of the club, although some of the boys thought that it would be simpler to have the president appoint some boy to fill out the unexpired portion of the office, if a vacancy should occur.

There was a good deal of discussion of the duties of the various officers. Henry Jordan thought it would be enough if the constitution simply set out the ordinary rules governing similar bodies. Ralph Parsons—the boys called him “Tubby”—suggested, quite ingenuously I thought, that he supposed the various officers would have so much work to do that they would not be expected to take part in the debates. The thought in his mind was clear to all. The boys evidently knew him. “No, indeed,” announced Jack, “the president and all the rest of the officers take part in the debates when their time comes.” “O, well!” sighed “Tubby.”

Frank made a suggestion at this point which I thought was very good. “There are other debating clubs,” he said, “we ought to get acquainted with. There are societies for doing other kinds of work which is worth while. There is the Epworth League, and the Christian Endeavor Society, and the Boy Scouts, and the High School literary society, and the Girls’ Library Club, and lots of organizations which are just as good as ours. I think it would be great to get together with them just as much as we can—have joint programmes and all that sort of thing, you know. It might be good for them, and I know it would be fine for us.”

“Splendid!” I could not help exclaiming.

“I move that it be one of the duties of the President to see these clubs and carry out this idea,” said George Perkins. This motion was carried enthusiastically. After more discussion the enumeration of the other duties of the officers was left to a committee.

One office was created for which I suppose I am responsible. The boys felt pretty “cocky” and Jack said something about the good work they were going to do in their club. They had asked me before to take part in their discussion and I ventured to ask: “How will you know whether your work is good or not?”

“Well,” Charlie Taylor replied, “when we have a debate with that Onarga bunch and lick them good and plenty, I guess they’ll know we are doing good work.”

“Well, we may not find judges who will stand for ‘lick them good and plenty’ arguments,” interrupted Frank. “That kind of talk won’t go in a dignified debating club.”

“Anyway,” I replied, “suppose you don’t know what kind of work you are doing until the result of some debate contest tells you. Isn’t it quite a while to wait?”

“I tell you what, boys,” I continued. “I know folks say there is a great deal of education in learning through our mistakes, and of course there is. But there is also a lot of energy wasted in doing things the wrong way. We would look well, wouldn’t we, if we insisted in finding out for ourselves every fact in geography or physics when we have available the accumulated experience of centuries. So don’t try to do it all alone, boys. Get some older men who have gone through the mill themselves and get them to act as your critics and advisers. You will save a lot of time and get along much better.”

This advice seemed good, and they adopted the following section: “The President shall appoint at each session of the club a Critic, whose duty it shall be to criticize the conduct of the meeting and of the individual members in all respects and to render to the club such other help in advice and counsel as may seem wise to him. Such Critic shall, when possible, be appointed from the honorary members of the club.”

When they came to the question of membership there was a hot debate. There was an almost even division on the question of admitting the girls. There was no nonsense about the boys; they were not rough or boorish on the one hand, nor “sissified” on the other. One faction contended stoutly that it would be a good thing to have the girls with them. They urged the difference in the minds of boys and girls and felt that any question would be better understood if they had both points of view about it.

Jack led the opposition to having the girls join. He said:

“You fellows all know my sister Polly.” (There was a chorus of assent and several side glances at Frank, who looked carefully out of the window.) “You know Polly is great. She is as good a fellow as any of you here.” Here he glared pugnaciously about, but as no one seemed to disagree with him in the least he continued.

“I would as lief chum with Polly as not—but not in this club. I think we would have better times and do more business if we were alone. We could easily enough have social nights in the club once in a while. We can always get the girls and have a good time together outside, but I believe we ought to keep the club out of it. I wish they would organize a debating club of their own. It would be great sport to have a joint debate.”

The antis won, and the word “boy” used in the provision on membership. Only two other points concerning membership made much discussion—how many votes were necessary to get a boy in and how many votes were necessary to get him out after he was in.

Will Morrissey had not talked much yet, but he grew eloquent when he urged that one vote should be enough to keep a boy out. “Why,” he said, “if we are going to do good work here we must be careful who we have in. If we have united action we must be a band of brothers. We must not have in here anyone who is obnoxious to anyone else.”

Pietro Frontenelli was an Italian lad who had completely won the hearts of the rest of the boys since he had been in Fairfield. He was supposed to be a socialist at least, quite likely an anarchist, possibly a Camorrist, but altogether a most likable fellow. The boys indifferently called him “Pete” or “Nellie” for short; he admitted himself that his whole name made quite a mouthful.

“Pete” thought it made little difference whether we all thought alike or not. “Of course,” he said, “we want to thresh out the questions we have up for discussion and get at what seems to be the correct answer. But it’s a sure shot we will be more likely to get at that result if we approach it from as many angles as we can. I would like to see members elected by a majority vote.”

George Perkins thought that provision would be too liberal and finally the boys compromised on allowing election if no more than three votes were cast against the candidate.

They decided to follow the same rule in the election of honorary members.

Right here I broke in again. “Boys,” I said, “let me repeat, don’t try to do it all alone. Get your older friends in. Get your big brothers, your fathers, your teachers, the fathers of the other boys, even if their sons don’t belong. It is a good thing to have a lot of them with you as honorary members. Of course they are busy men. There will not be many of them out any one night, but you ought to have some outsiders and advisers here every night.”

“I don’t know about that,” said “Tubby.” “If we have folks like that here, we won’t feel free and easy. We will be on dress parade all the time.”

“That’s just how we should be,” said Charlie Taylor. “If we don’t take ourselves seriously, no one else will.”

“That’s the way to talk,” chimed in Jimmy Francis. “We don’t want any ‘rough house’ or bear dances or anything like that. We want to do business in this club of ours.”

“Now, look here, fellows,” said “Tubby.” “Who said anything about rough house or anything like it? I don’t want that any more than you do.”

Jimmy assured him that they all knew that he wasn’t standing for anything like “rough house.”

“But it’s going to be awful hard work to keep braced up all the time,” he sighed to himself. “I won’t dare even to slide down in my chair. O well!”

When it came to considering the conduct of members within the society and methods of discipline, the boys were decidedly at sea. They wanted to maintain the dignity of the club and yet they wanted to be fair to everyone. “But,” as Frank Lawrence put it, “what rule shall we follow in passing upon the guilt of members? What standards shall we follow? What is a crime and what is not a crime?”

That was the question. What should be regarded as conduct unbecoming a member of the club? It was finally decided that no one code of rules could answer such a question, but that each case should stand on its own merits. Consequently the section was worded like this: “Any member who is guilty of conduct unbecoming a member of the club may, at any regular meeting, be suspended or expelled at the discretion of the club. But the charge against such member shall be signed by one of the officers of the club or at least three members, shall definitely state the facts constituting the alleged offense, shall lie on the table one week, and shall require a two-thirds vote of the members present for its adoption.”

In arranging for their programmes the boys felt that they should allow some latitude for joint sessions with other clubs. Consequently they instructed their committee who had the drafting of the rules in charge to give a place for such things on the order of business. While they were organizing a debating club, they said, they didn’t want to shut out anything else they might want to do.