decoration as a profession. Let any two bright and capable girls who have wearied themselves in painting water-colors that people do not want, or Christmas cards for which the market is waning, try another experiment. Let them, after studying in the art schools of New York or Boston or Cincinnati, make also a careful study of the markets and workshops of those cities, so far as they relate to decoration; and then go, armed with circulars, price-lists, plans, and patterns, to establish themselves as household decorators in some interior city, where the wave of modern improvement has thus far come only as a matter of intelligent interest, not of systematic supply. They will have to wait awhile, no doubt, to command public confidence, or even to make their mission understood; but they will not have to wait so long as their brothers will wait for clients or for patients. They will need to be very practical, very accurate, very efficient, and very patient. The great dealers in the larger cities will gladly make them their agents, give them letters of introduction, and pay them a commission on sales. With a little tact they can learn to coöperate with the local dealers, to whom they will naturally leave the coarser supplies, devoting themselves to the finer touches. If they succeed at all, their circle of clients or correspondents may extend through whole states, and they will help to refine the life and thought of the nation. By all means let us see women take up household decoration as an educated profession. -T. W. HIGGINSON: Women as Household Decorators, from Women and Men, by permission. Copyright, 1887, by Harper and Brothers.

D. How could the following narrative be utilized as an argument? Make a proposition that it would fitly illustrate and help to prove. What part is refutation?

I was once met by a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter of the town, who burst into tears at sight

of me, and asked for money to buy her sick mother bread. The very next day I was passing through the same street, and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly she asked for money for the same good object. The benevolent-looking lady gave her nothing, and she tried her woes upon several other people, none of whom gave her anything. I was forced to doubt whether, upon the whole, her game was worth the candle, or whether she was really making a provision for her declining years by this means. To be sure, her time was not worth much, and she could hardly have got any other work, she was so young; but it seemed hardly a paying industry. By any careful calculation, I do not believe she would have been found to have amassed more than ten or fifteen cents a day; and perhaps she really had a sick mother at home. Many persons are obliged to force their emotions for money, whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet I suppose a really good citizen who found this little girl trying to cultivate the sympathies of charitable people by that system of irrigation, would have had her suppressed as an impostor.

In a way she was an impostor, though her sick mother may have been starving, as she said. It is a nice question. Shall we always give to him that asketh? Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we know that he has come by his destitution honestly? In other words, what is a deserving case of charity—or, rather, what is not? Is a starving or freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious? What is desert in the poor? What is desert in the rich, I suppose the reader would answer. If this is so,

and if we ought not to succor an undeserving poor person, then we ought not to succor an undeserving rich person. It will be said that a rich person, however undeserving, will never be in need of our succor, but this is not so clear. If

we saw a rich person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although we knew him to be a man whose life was stained by every vice and excess, and cruel, wanton, idle, luxurious? -W. D. HOWELLS: Harper's, Dec., 1896.

The Proposition.

129. That his hearers may know precisely what they are expected to believe or to do, the maker of an argument must express his theme in the form of a definite proposition,— that is, in a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate. In no other form of discourse is a proposition an absolute necessity; in argumentation it is. You can write a description of "Our Football Team"; you can write a narrative of "Our Football Team"; but you cannot argue "Our Football Team." There must be something asserted of it; that is, there must be a proposition, before argument can begin. Thus you can argue for or against the proposition that "Our football team is the best in the state.' You can write an exposition of "Strikes," but you cannot argue "Strikes." You must make a proposition including the term, "Strikes," before argument can begin; thus, "Strikes cannot succeed unless supported by public opinion," or "Strikes should be supplanted by Compulsory Arbitration," or any one of a thousand other assertions about strikes. Sometimes, it is true, we speak of a phrase like "Votes for Women" as if it could be argued; but it cannot be argued unless it is turned into a proposition,-"Women should be granted the right to vote," or is understood, by all concerned, to be equivalent to that proposition. The same thing is true of a subject

for argument that is expressed in the form of a question. "Shall women be granted the right to vote?" must be understood to mean one or the other of these propositions, "Women should be granted the right to vote " or "Women should not be granted the right

to vote."

The proposition should be the clear and exact statement of the conclusion which the writer or speaker has reached in his own thinking, and to which he hopes to bring his audience by means of his arguments. In formal debate the situation requires that the exact proposition be made known beforehand, and that the precise meaning of the terms of the proposition, what it includes and what it does not include, be agreed to by both sides and explained at the outset. In less formal argumentation this is not usually deemed necessary.

Nor is it always advisable; for if the audience is thought to be hostile to the speaker's views, the full statement of the proposition may best be deferred until his hearers have been prepared to receive it. Thus, in Burke's speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, you are made aware in the very first paragraph that Burke desires to conciliate the colonies somehow; in the ninth paragraph you learn that Burke's proposition is peace; that he proposes, by a simple plan, somehow to remove the ground of the difference between the colonies and the mother country; but it is not until the ninety-first paragraph that he lets his audience know precisely what he proposes: namely, that Parliament should establish, by passing certain resolutions, the principle of raising money in the colonies by voluntary grants of the colonial assemblies rather than by imposing taxes. Burke

knew his audience to be out of sympathy with his proposition, and so he deferred its full and exact statement until he was ready to present his resolutions. For similar reasons, doubtless, Hosmer in his Samuel Adams (see p. 46, ante, for the paragraph in question) delayed announcing the full statement of his proposition until the very end of the paragraph had been reached. By this delay he was able to forestall opposition that would inevitably have been offered had the proposition been stated boldly at the outset.

Whether the proposition is stated at the beginning or is reserved until necessary explanations have been made, it is kept definitely in mind by the writer all of the time. He knows exactly what it is before he begins to write and holds it before him while writing.

130.

Assignments on the Proposition.

A. Read the following and write out the exact proposition that was in the father's mind on the subject of shooting birds.

He went hunting the very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was a suicidal sapsucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eat the sapsucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no, sapsuckers were not good to eat. "Then you took its poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it?" - HOWELLS: A Boy's Town, p. 154.

. B. Is the first sentence, or the last, or a combination of the two, the exact proposition in the following?