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?

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.

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 orb 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

(b) Absolute proscription is not advocated by the Autocrat.

(c) A slang phrase may be filled with meaning by

man of thought.

one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-downlipped sophomore in the one word — slow. Let us discriminate, and be shy of absolute proscription. I am omniverbivorous by nature and training. Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.

Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something. They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. HOLMES: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, II, p. 353.

B. Make a careful analysis of the following: To what extent is exposition used? What sentences are intended to meet possible objections?

1. The death of Cæsar was an irreparable loss. It involved the state in civil wars for many a year, until, in the end, it fell again under the supremacy of Augustus, who had neither the talent, nor the will, nor the power to carry out Cæsar's beneficent plans. Cæsar's murder was a senseless act. Had it been possible at all to restore the Republic, it would have inevitably fallen into the hands of a most profligate aristocracy, who would have sought nothing but their own aggrandizement, would have demoralized the people still more, and would have established their own greatness upon the ruins of the country. It is only necessary

to recollect the latter years of the Republic, the depravity and corruption of the ruling classes, the scenes of violence and bloodshed which constantly occurred in the streets of Rome, to render it evident that peace and security could not be restored except by the strong hand of a sovereign. The Roman world would have been fortunate if it had submitted to the mild and beneficent sway of Cæsar.

-SCHMITZ: History of Rome.

2. An abuse like our spoils system does not remain stationary. Either it will be reformed, or it will increase by its own momentum, till we shall see, at first cautiously and under specious pretenses, and finally as a matter of course, all the best offices in the army and navy appropriated at every change of administration on the theory "To the victors belong the spoils." And why not? It would be as reasonable and just to make changes in military and naval offices on party grounds as it is in the civil service. If such changes are good for the civil service, they ought to be good for other branches of the service. This is the way the advocates of rotation would argue; and although such a development of the spoils system would be deprecated by all friends of good administration, we must not be too confident it will not occur.

ANDREWS: Administrative Reform, 28.

3. Competition is the best security for cheapness, but by no means a security for quality. In former times, when producers and consumers were less numerous, it was a security for both. The market was not large enough nor the means of publicity sufficient to enable a dealer to make a fortune by continually attracting new customers: his success depended on his retaining those that he had; and when a dealer furnished good articles, or when he did not, the fact was soon known to those whom it concerned, and he ac

quired a character for honest or dishonest dealing of more importance to him than the gain that would be made by cheating casual purchasers. But on the great scale of modern transactions, with the great multiplication of competition and the immense increase in the quantity of business competed for, dealers are so little dependent on permanent customers that character is much less essential to them, while there is also far less certainty of their obtaining the character they deserve. The low prices which a tradesman advertises are known to a thousand, for one who has discovered for himself or learned from others that the bad quality of the goods is more than an equivalent for their cheapness. MILL: Chapters on Socialism.

C. Study the following for illustrations of the way description is utilized as argument. The first three paragraphs of description prove what? What does the fourth paragraph prove?

It once happened to me to spend a day or two in a country house where the different rooms gave unconscious objectlessons to show the gradual change of taste in household decoration. One room-the sitting room of an elderly invalid represented what might be called the iron age of furnishing; everything was dark mahogany and haircloth; there was not a chair or a sofa on which you could retain your seat without a struggle, so polished and so slippery were they all. The walls were hung with dark portraits in dark frames, or smaller daguerreotypes in circles of black walnut; the only spots of color were found in one faded. sampler, and in the gilded circular frame of a very small mirror hung too high for use.

It was curious to pass from this sombre abode into the bedroom I occupied, which had been fitted up by an elder sister, long since married, and whose girlhood fell in what might be called the glacial period of thirty years ago. Here