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1. While it might be easy to bribe the representative of a district, it would

be impossible to bribe a whole district or state.

For

a. A large majority of the people are always eager to be on the side

of justice.

VI. They will make it easier to elect good men to office. For

1. There will be no incentive to buy men before they are elected or to elect men

who can be bought after election.

B. They will open the door to legislative progress.

For

I. They will give the people the power to get the legislation they want without discouraging delays.

II. They will elevate the press and greatly diminish partisanship. For

1. Attention will then be directed to measures rather than to party or individual success.

III. They will educate the people as no other institution can.

For

a. They require that the voters study

the questions before the people.

IV. They will simplify the law and aid in its

enforcement.

C. They will act as a safety valve against discontent, and as a guarantee against disorder. For I. They will clarify the political atmosphere and settle questions permanently.

II. Revolutions have little chance where the people can easily change their laws.

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Argumentation and Exposition.

126. The chief difference between argumentation and exposition is in the purpose. In exposition the purpose is to explain the subject to those who do not understand it clearly. In argumentation the purpose is not merely to explain; it is to convince and to persuade others to accept one belief or one course of action rather than another.

Again, the writer of exposition assumes that there is only one true explanation of the subject and that people are ready and willing to accept this explanation as fast as he can make it clear to their minds. argument can assume no such thing. some people dissent entirely from his resist accepting it as long as they can. others are indifferent and must be interested and persuaded.

But the writer of
He knows that
view and will
He knows that

-

Yet the writer of argument must use exposition constantly as a help in convincing and persuading. He will feel it necessary to explain carefully every step of his reasoning, and to that end he will use freely any of the means of exposition that we have studied connecting new ideas with old, definition, generalized narration, comparison and analogy, specific instances, examples, contrasts, reconciling contradictory ideas, dividing and subdividing. But he will use these only because they help him to convince and persuade people to believe or to act as he wishes them to believe or to act.

Notice with what fullness the writer of the following illustrates his meaning, before he announces his proposition in the fourth sentence.

If a servant girl applies for employment in a family, we demand, first of all, a recommendation from her former mistress. If a clerk is searching for work, he carries with him, as the sine qua non of success, certain letters which vouch for his honesty and ability. If a skilled workman becomes discontented and throws up his job, he has a right to ask of his employer an indorsement, and armed with that he feels secure. Why should not every immigrant be required to bring a similar indorsement with him? Why should we allow the whole riffraff of creation to come here, either to become a burden on our charitable institutions, or to lower the wages of our own laborers by a cutthroat competition? We have already had too much of that sort of thing. If a foreigner has notified the nearest United States consul of his intention to emigrate, and the consul, after due examination, has pronounced him a proper person, let him come by all means. We have room enough for such persons. But for immigrants who have neither capital nor skill, who never earned a living in their own country and will never earn one here, we have no room whatever:

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Description and Narration in Argument.

127. The writer of argument will also use description and narration, to help him win people to his view. If, for instance, he is arguing against long examinations, he will likely find it a good argument to describe the looks of the examination room and of the teacher and pupils after they have been engaged in an examination for two or three hours. If he is arguing in favor of a law to limit the hours of labor for factory women, he will describe some of the scenes that may be witnessed in factories where conditions are bad. He may tell the

story of one of these overworked women to bring his hearers to his view. But he will use narration and description, as he uses exposition, solely because they help him to convince and persuade people to believe or to act as he wishes them to believe or to act.

128. Assignments in the Relation of Argumentation to Exposition, Description, and Narration.

A. With the help of the marginal analysis, decide whether the writer of the following is aware that there are two sides to the question. What methods of exposition does he employ?

The proposition: Slang should be eschewed.

Slang does not truly characterize its object.

Examples:
'fast,' 'slow,'
'brick,' 'cut
up,' 'bore.'

Slang fails to discriminate shades of meaning.

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I think there is one habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards, worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or slang terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories, fast or slow. Man's chief end was to be a brick. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being a good deal cut up. Nine tenths of human existence were summed up in the single word, bore. These expressions come to be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy; you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the treasury upon which they

When freely used, it corrupts and starves vocabulary.

Its source is contemptible.

Objection:
The Autocrat
sometimes uses
slang himself.

Reply:
(a) On rare
occasions a
slang phrase
may be precisely
what is needed.

are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing smoking clubs are the places where these conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly. Don't think I undervalue the proper use and application of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear slang phraseology, it is commonly the dish-water from the washings of English dandyism, schoolboy or full-grown, wrung out of a threevolume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial climate.

66

The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was rum " to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

I replied with my usual forbearance. — Certainly, to give up the algebraic symbol because a or b is often a cover for ideal nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation (as I supposed), all of which could have been sufficiently explained by the participle — bored. I have seen a country clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a

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