Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/548

532 ownership of the pigs or the ethnological character of the Gadarenes; or the propriety of meddling with other poeple'speople's [sic] property without legal warrant. And each of these questions might be so "narrowed" when it arose "on secular testimony" that I should not know where I was. So I am silent on this part of the proposition.

But I do dimly discern in the latter moiety of this mysterious paragraph a reproof of that use of "the extremest weapons of controversy" which is attributed to me. Upon which I have to observe that I guide myself in such matters very much by the maxim of a great statesman, "Do ut des." If Mr. Gladstone objects to the employment of such weapons in defense, he would do well to abstain from them in attack. He should not frame charges which he has, afterward, to admit are erroneous, in language of carefully calculated offensiveness (Impregnable Rock, pp. 269, 270); he should not assume that persons with whom he disagrees are so wrecklessly unconscientious as to evade the trouble of inquiring what has. been said or known about a great question (Impregnable Rock, p. 273); he should not qualify the results of careful thought as "hand-over-head reasoning" (Impregnable Rock, p. 274); he should not, as in the extraordinary propositions which I have just analyzed, make assertions respecting his opponent's position and arguments which are contradicted by the plainest facts.

Persons who, like myself, having spent their lives outside the political world, yet take a mild and philosophical concern in what goes on in it, often find it difficult to understand what our neighbors call the psychological moment of this or that party leader; and are, occasionally, loath to believe in the seeming conditions of certain kinds of success. And, when some chieftain, famous in political warfare, adventures into the region of letters or of science, in full confidence that the methods which have brought fame and honor in his own province will answer there, he is apt to forget that he will be judged by these people; on whom rhetorical artifices have long ceased to take effect; and to whom, mere dexterity in putting together cleverly ambiguous phrases, and even the great art of offensive misrepresentation, are unspeakably wearisome. And, if that weariness finds its expression in sarcasm, the offender really has no right to cry out. Assuredly ridicule is no test of truth, but it is the righteous meed of some kinds of error. Nor ought the attempt to confound the expression of a revolted sense of fair dealing with arrogant impatience of contradiction, to restrain those to whom "the extreme weapons of controversy" come handy from using them. The function of police in the intellectual, if not in the civil, economy may sometimes be legitimately discharged by volunteers.