"Truth is worth more than victory."

From morning till night, at the breakfast table, on the way to school, in recitations, at recess, on the athletic field, over our indoor work and play, - on all occasions, we are trying to make somebody else see as we see. In many cases argument is simple exposition; as soon as we can explain our meaning to a friend, he agrees with us. Suppose you say, "A college graduate is not an educated person." Your friend naturally replies that boys and girls go to college to get an education. But when you explain that it takes a lifetime to acquire an education, - that a college course merely goes a step beyond the grammar and high schools in showing one how to become educated, how to grow, - your friend will probably agree to your first statement. Clearly the first thing for you and him to do is to agree upon a definition of the word in question. To be sure, this agreement may leave nothing to argue, but in the course of coming to the agreement you may find a fair field for argument.

The following selections are illustrations of editorials which are partly argument and partly exposition:

1. Money Thrown Away

Professor James says that few college instructors can easily follow a lecture given in French. The number of students who can do so is smaller. The number of American college graduates who could order a fiacre in Paris or inquire their way to the Hotel des Involutes and be understood by a Parisian is not large, despite all the money spent on teaching them the language of La Belle France.

That is not a pleasing subject for reflection, and the New York Evening Post, mindful of that fact, comes to the rescue of the foreign language departments of our schools and colleges by saying that talking a foreign language is not of much account anyway - that to read it is the thing.

Now it is an easy matter to learn to read French. One does not need the aid of foreign or native professors to acquire that accomplishment. If the best our schools and colleges can do, after all the money they use up in teaching French, is to fit a pupil to read that language, they have not much to boast of.

Wherefore, we are inclined to the opinion that much of the money spent in public schools and in colleges in trying to teach French is money thrown away. This ought not to be so. Some linguistic expert should find a way out of the difficulty. For, notwithstanding the argument of the Evening Post, French is taught in German schools in such a manner that students can read and write it, and speak it also, as the French soldiers found to their grief in the Franco-Prussian war.

What Germans can do Americans can do - if they want to.

2. Electrifying Our Railroads

It is announced that the friends of the plan to compel electrification of railroad lines in the Boston metropolitan district are to attend the hearing before the committee on metropolitan affairs this morning, prepared to present facts and figures showing that positive legislation on the subject is feasible at this session. Their contention is well founded.

For legislation is entirely possible at once. It need not be drastic nor command impossibilities. But it can and ought to be such as to make a start in the matter and require a beginning of the much-needed reform within a reasonable time.

If we await the action of the railroads themselves, contingent upon all sorts of other schemes, financial and legislative, we shall get nowhere, and ten years away are likely to find us submerged in the old familiar grime and smoke. The lesson of New York should be sufficient; who believes that anything would ever have been done there had not the roads been compelled to electrify all trains entering the Grand Central station ?

"The way to resume is to resume." The way to electrify is to enact some reasonable and common-sense law now and see that it is enforced.

183. Developing The Argument

In argumentative writing, as in exposition, we shall find that: (1) the necessity of stating just what we are to show will aid us in securing unity; (2) the logical arrangement is of great importance;

(3) one way of gaining emphasis is through proportion;

(4) the value of our work frequently depends on the skill with which we use illustrations by example, but we must not attach undue importance to a single illustration by example.

In exposition we set forth one view of a subject. In argument our purpose is to show that one view is better than another. Hence, we need to be particularly careful about the choice of evidence. In selecting evidence which is really nothing but opinion we must remember, for example, that one man's opinion is of no great value unless that man is an expert; and that the substantial agreement of several experts is naturally considered to be more valuable than the opinion of any one of them.

The methods employed in developing argument are like those with which we have become familiar in exposition: by details, by examples, by repetition, by comparison and contrast, by cause and effect. In many cases two or more methods will be required in an argumentative essay, and we must be ready to use every means at hand to make our points clear and forceful.