XXXIX. Outline and write an exposition on

My Beliefs about Exercise.

My Method of Study.

My Test of Friendship.

XL. Make an expository outline of all you know about

Exposition.

XLI. Draw up an outline of the chief precautions to be taken to insure good Exposition, and classify under

your various headings the exercises in this group, placing each one under the caution or direction which will be most important in working it out.

XLII. Select ten subjects from your own experience worthy of thorough exposition. Write on one or more of them.

CHAPTER VIII

ARGUMENT

Argument and Exposition. In the preceding chapter we learned that Exposition means making a thing clear; that it explains a position, a process, a theory, a character, etc. The appeal in Exposition is made entirely to the understanding. Argument also makes clear, and appeals to the understanding, but in addition it attempts to change the minds of those to whom it is addressed; that is, the appeal in Argument is made not only to the understanding, but also to the convictions and feelings. Our aim in Argument is to make others believe as we believe, to win them over to our own view. In Exposition our aim is to present matter clearly to them, regardless of opinion or belief one way or another. Hence, we may define Argument as that form of composition which aims to win others over to a realization of the truth or falsity of a given proposition.

Argument and the Other Forms. The bearing of other kinds of discourse upon Argument and of Argument upon them has been explained. Argument calls into play all the other forms for its own ends; it is more of a compound than any of the others. People may be won over to a belief by the telling of a good story (Narration); people may sometimes be convinced by a clear and complete explanation (Exposition); and the mere depiction (Description), say, of a city slum, is the best argument in the world for the alleviation of slum life. All three of these forms are often brought into play for purposes of argument.

The Nature of Argument. Argument, however, though it may employ the other forms, differs in structure as well as purpose from all of them. We know from arguing with our friends, that in order to persuade we must build up a logical proof of our proposition. And this structure of logical proof is what makes an argument. It is this we are to study, although we will not fail to notice the Narration, the Description, especially the Exposition, which the arguer may use in building this structure. Argument is, as we know, preeminently the oral form of discourse. As a rule we think of speaking when we think of argument; as we think of writing when we think of the other forms.

EXERCISES

I. Notice the development of the thought in the following paragraphs.

a. What is the topic sentence for each?

b. What are the relations of the sub-topic sentences to the main ones?

c. What other forms of discourse are used?

1. A poet himself has sung in vain of what makes the little songs linger in our hearts for ages, while epics perish and tragedies pass out of sight. Why this is so we shall never know by reason alone. Way down in the human heart there is a tenderness for self-sacrifice which makes it seem loftier than the love of glory, and reveals the possibility of the eternal soul. Wars and sieges pass away, and great intellectual efforts cease to stir our hearts, but the man who sacrifices himself for his fellow lives forever. We forget the war in which was the siege of Zutphen, and almost the city itself, but we shall never forget the death of Sir Philip Sidney. Scholars alone read the work of his life, but all mankind honors him in the story of his death. The great war of the Crimea, in our own day, with its generals and marshals, and its bands of storming soldiery, has almost passed from our memories, but the time will never come when the charge of Balaklava will cease to stir the heart or pass from story

S

or from song. It happened to Stephen Girard, mariner and merchant, seeking wealth and finding it, whose ships covered every sea, whose intellect penetrated, as your treasurer's books will show, a hundred years into the future, to light up his life by a deed more noble than the dying courtesy of Sidney and braver than the charge of the six hundred, for he walked under his own orders day by day and week by week, shoulder to shoulder with death, and was not afraid. How fit, indeed, it is that amidst these temples which are the tribute to his intellect should stand the tablet which is the tribute to his heart!

THOMAS BRACKETT REED'S The Immortality of Good Deeds. 2. Society can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race can exist, and all his faculties be fully developed. Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty or freedom must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of society are as paramount to individual liberty as the safety and well-being of the race is to that of individuals; and, in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount to individual liberty. On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject, in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man, the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies. -JOHN C. CALHOUN'S Liberty and Intelligence.

3. If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not

ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new - North as well as South.

- LINCOLN'S Speech of Acceptance of the Republican Nomination for U. S. Senator at Springfield, Ill., June 17, 1858.

4. Mr. Lincoln says that this Government cannot endure permanently in the same condition in which it was made by its framers

divided into free and slave states. He says that it has existed for about seventy years thus divided, and yet he tells you that it cannot endure permanently on the same principles and in the same relative condition in which our fathers made it. Why can it not exist divided into free and slave states? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day, made this Government divided into free states and slave states, and left each state perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery. Why can it not exist on the same principles on which our fathers made it? They knew when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production, and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities. They knew that the laws and regulations which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be unsuited to the rice plantations of South Carolina, and they therefore provided that each state should retain its own legislature and its own sovereignty, with the full and complete power to do as it pleased within its own limits, in all that was local and not national. One of the reserved rights of the states was the right to regulate the relations between master and servant, on the slavery question. DOUGLAS' Reply to above speech.