Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boy did not know what that meant; in his own mind he could not disentangle the idea of bows from the idea of arrows. HOWELLS: A Boy's Town, p. 58.

145. Assignments on the Test for Pertinence.

A. In the following, point out every instance in which the writer (Macaulay) charges that the arguments of his opponents are not pertinent.

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face,

and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king. We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of consideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations; and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

B. Thomas Campbell was the first editor of Shakespeare to defend Shylock. In his edition of the plays, in 1838, he said :—

In the picture of the Jew there is not the tragic grandeur of Richard III, but there is a similar force of mind and the same subtlety of intellect, though it is less selfish. In point of courage I would give the palm to Shylock, for he was an ill-used man and the champion of an oppressed race; nor is he a hypocrite, like Richard. In fact, Shakespeare, while he lends himself to the prejudices against Jews, draws so philosophical a picture of the energetic Jewish character that he traces the blame of its faults to the iniquity of the Christian world. Shylock's arguments are more logical than those of his opponents, and the latter overcome him only by a legal quibble. But he is a usurer and liver on the interest of lent moneys; and what but Christian persecution forced him to live by these means? But he is also inhuman and revengeful. Why? Because they called him a dog and spat upon his Jewish gaberdine. They voided their rheum upon him, and he in return wished to void his revenge upon them. All this is natural, and Shylock has nothing unnatural about him.

What inference do you draw from the fact that no previous editor of Shakespeare expressed such an opinion about Shylock? Suppose some one should say: "This inference is not warranted. Previous editors didn't mention it because it was self-evident." How would you make reply?

C. What wrong inference is charged in the following?

Now, let me call attention to some other facts which protectionist politicians do not like to discuss pointedly.

When comparisons are made of wages paid in this country with wages paid in the same industries in Europe, protectionists compare the amounts earned for a certain time. By this method they conceal the fact that the American working man produces more, in proportion to his pay, than his European brother.

American shoe workers, for instance, may get more wages per week than English shoe workers, but they turn out so many more shoes in a week that the labor cost of a pair of shoes here is less than it is in England.

And so in many other industries.

That is one reason why many American products undersell European products in Europe and elsewhere.

Protectionists forget all about this when they speak of "protecting American industries from the cheap foreign labor clamoring for a chance to climb over the bars."

When hat manufacturers plead that it will be unprofitable for them to continue in the hat business without a tariff, they practically declare that their business is an unnecessary burden on the American people. If the hat business cannot exist without compelling the people to pay it a sum over and above the true value of its products, it is not a benefit to the community. It is an injury.

Likewise if Southern growers of cotton, pineapples, or oranges tell the truth in proclaiming that a protective tariff

is needed for their products, they only inform the American people that the country would be better off without them.

To believe them is to believe that the United States is so poor a country that it can produce nothing which can hold its own in an open market, on its own unsupported merits.

To believe them, is to believe that American labor is so inefficient, that it cannot produce as much in proportion to wages as the most degraded and poorest paid foreign labor. We know better than that. The Public, 12: 584.

D. Must we assume that the person who advocates the following proposition is opposed to all football games? "Interscholastic football games should be prohibited." What other assumption is possible? What other theory may he hold, consistent with the proposition?

Tests of Arguments for Strength.

146. Another test of arguments has to do with their different force and validity. Absolute certainty is not possible. We must usually be content with something less. When we say that a thing is "morally certain," we imply that we are convinced that it is safe to act upon it. The best that most arguments can accomplish is to establish a high degree of probability that the proposition is true. Various degrees of probability may be distinguished in various kinds of arguments, ranging from high to low, and ending with mere possibility. Some arguments only tend to show that the proposition might be or ought to be true. This is illustrated in the following paragraph on the proposition, Hamlet was really mad.

From the natural structure and working of his mind; from the recent doings in the royal family; from the state

of things at the Court; still more from his interview with the Ghost, and the Ghost's appalling disclosures and injunctions, "shaking his disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul"; above all, from his instant view and grasp of the whole dire situation in which he is now placed; from all this, he ought to be crazy; and it were vastly to his credit, both morally and mentally, to be so: we might well be amazed at the morbid strength or the natural weakness of his mind, if he were not so. We are told that, against stupidity, the gods themselves are powerless. And, sure enough, there are men with hearts so hard, and with heads so stolid and stockish, that even the gods cannot make them mad; at least, not unless through some physical disease. Hamlet, I think, can hardly be a man of that stamp.

- HUDSON: Shakespeare's Life, Art, and Characters, II, p. 270.

Further arguments or arguments of a different kind. may furnish reasons for inferring that the proposition is probable. Thus Professor Hudson continues the argument quoted above by offering the argument that a man after such an experience with a ghost as Hamlet had could hardly continue to be of the same mental soundness as he was before. Then he cites the fact that Hamlet is believed to be really mad by all the other persons in the play, except the King, whose evil conscience makes him suspicious that the madness is assumed to cover some evil design. "Of course,"

argues Professor Hudson, "this so general belief arises because he acts precisely as madmen often do; because his conduct displays the proper symptoms and indications of madness. . . And indeed it seems to be ad