ever remember with the most grateful emotions. In full confidence that you, by your sense of humanity and justice, will supply the many defects in my feeble advocacy, I now resign into your hands the fate of my clients. As you shall do unto them, so, under like circumstances, may it be done unto you.' "1

But gaining sympathy for one's self is not the whole of persuasion. The emotions, which, as we have seen, are the mainsprings of action, must be given a final stimulus. It is never safe to leave all appeal to the emotions to be made in the conclusion; the feelings must be stirred in the introduction, and kept constantly active through all the discussion. But there the work of persuasion is only begun; in order to bring the emotions finally into play, they must be wrought to the highest pitch of all at the close, and directed to the desired end. Consequently, in any great oration, it is in the peroration that we find the most impassioned eloquence; it is here that the orator spends his powers freely in the final appeal. The conclusion must complete, and give carrying force to the work of persuasion, as it does to the work of conviction.

The emotions are so many, and the possible ways of stirring them so varied, that examples are not of any real value. To gain such power requires a study of the whole field of the persuasive art - a study of human nature, a study of audiences, a study of the world's oratory. Finally, to develop the fruits

1 "Great Speeches by Great Lawyers," pp. 121-123.

of study into real power, demands, in the words of Demosthenes, "Practice! practice! practice!"

To choose an example of persuasion in the conclusion, involves discrimination among many of the most brilliant passages in the world's oratory. The following, from the speech by Grattan on the "Declaration of Irish Right," is not given as, in any sense, the best; it is simply an illustration :

"I might, as a constituent, come to your bar and demand my liberty. I do call upon you by the laws of the land, and their violation; by the instruction of eighteen centuries; by the arms, inspiration, and providence of the present movement tell us the rule by which we shall go; assert the law of Ireland; declare the liberty of the land! I will not be answered by a public lie, in the shape of an amendment; nor, speaking for the subject's freedom, am I to hear of faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe in this our island, in common with my fellowsubjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be to break your chains and contemplate your glory. I never shall be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags. He may be naked, he shall not be in irons. And I do see the time at hand; the spirit has gone forth; the declaration of right is planted, and though great men should fall off, the cause will live; and though he who utters this should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the organ that conveys it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him."1

1 Hardwicke, "History of Oratory and Orators," p. 138.

CHAPTER V

REFUTATION

"REFUTATION consists in the destruction of opposing proofs." As suggested in this definition, refutation is, in form, destructive rather than constructive; but in its purposes and results it is no less serviceable than positive proof. With respect to any given proposition, there are always two contrary beliefs that a person may hold: he may believe that the proposition is true or that it is not true. Consequently, if we can induce him to reject the opposite of what we uphold, we are thereby preparing him to accept our own views. Negative argument pure and simple is rarely, if ever, sufficient; for belief is always essentially positive in nature, so that to destroy without building up will not serve our purpose. Refutation, therefore, is properly auxiliary and supplementary to positive proof. In our attempt to convince or persuade any man, we must realize that he will, almost surely, have in his own mind many preconceived ideas and preëstablished opinions about the matter in discussion, and that many of those ideas and opinions are liable to be antagonistic to what we are trying to make him believe. In such circumstances, our success must often depend upon our ability to destroy these hostile conceptions, thus

preparing the way for the acceptance of our own contentions. The necessity for such destructive effort is, of course, peculiarly pressing in any form of disputation where the arguer is confronted by some definite opponents, as in debate, or perhaps in a newspaper controversy; for here, the audience or readers are consciously balancing the two sides of the question, and they must be made to see with perfect clearness, that one side overthrows and destroys the other. But in any form of argumentative discussion there are always opponents of some kind, either real or imaginary, and they must be mastered before we can hope to make others fully accept our own beliefs.

The partial or complete destruction of such opposing opinions and arguments often calls for a keener insight and a more adroit attack, than does any of the positive work of construction. It therefore becomes of the first importance to decide how much one ought to refute, and what are the various methods that may be used.

How much to refute

Concerning the question of how much to refute, John Quincy Adams, in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (Lecture XXII), says:

"There are three very common errors in the management of controversy against which I think it proper here to guard you, and from which I hope you will hereafter very sedulously guard yourselves. The first may be termed

answering too much; the second answering too little; and the third answering yourself, and not your opponent.”

Speaking of the first of these mistakes, he says:

"You answer too much when you make it an invariable principle to reply to everything which has been or could be said by your antagonist on the other side. . . . If you contend against a diffuse speaker, who has wasted hour after hour in a lingering lapse of words, which had little or no bearing upon the proper question between you, it is incumbent upon you to discriminate between that part of his discourse which was pertinent, and that which was superfluous. Nor is it less necessary to detect the artifice of an adversary, who purposely mingles a flood of extraneous matter with the controversy, for the sake of disguising the weakness of his cause. In the former of these two cases, if you undertake to answer everything that has been said, you charge yourself with all the tediousness of your adversary, and double the measure by an equal burden of your own. In the latter you promote the cause of your antagonist by making yourself the dupe of his stratagem. If, then, you have an opponent whose redundancies arise only from his weakness, whose standard of oratory is time, and whose measure of eloquence is in arithmetical proportion to the multitude of his words, your general rule should be to pass over all his general, unappropriate declamation in silence; to take no more notice of it than if it had never been spoken. But if you see that the external matter is obtruded upon the subject with design to mislead your attention, and fix it upon objects different from that which is really at issue, you should so far take notice of it as to point out the artifice, and derive from it an argument of the most powerful efficacy to your own side."