Part 24 (1/2)
STATISTICS. Statistics improperly used are dry and uninteresting; they often spoil an otherwise forceful and persuasive debate. The trouble often lies, strange to say, in the accuracy with which the figures are given. A brain that is already doing its utmost to accept almost instantaneously a mult.i.tude of facts and comprehend their significance, or a brain that is somewhat sluggish and lazy, refuses to be burdened with uninteresting and unimportant details. For this reason, when a debater speaks of 10,564,792 people, the brain becomes wearied with the numbers and in disgust is apt to turn away from the whole matter. On the other hand, the round sum 10,000,000 not only does not burden the brain, but also, under ordinary conditions, gives in a rather forceful manner the information it was intended to convey.
”About five hundred” presents a much more vivid picture than ”four hundred and eighty-six” or ”five hundred and eighteen”; ”fifteen per cent.” is stronger than ”fifteen and one-tenth per cent.”; the expression ”eighty years” seems to indicate a longer period of time than ”eighty-two years, seven months, and twenty-nine days.”
If one is to quote statistics, he should always, unless the circ.u.mstances be very unusual, use round numbers. Figures themselves, however, are often less emphatic than other methods of expression. The ordinary mind can not grasp the significance of large numbers. That the state of Texas contains over a quarter of a million of square miles means little to the average person; he neither remembers the exact area of other states nor can he realize what an immense territory these figures stand for. The following quotation gives the area of Texas in much more vivid and forceful language:--
If you take Texas by the upper corner and swing it on that as a pivot, you will lop off the lower end of California, cut through Idaho, overlap South Dakota, touch Michigan, bisect Ohio, reach West Virginia, cut through North Carolina and South Carolina, lop off all the western side of Florida, and blanket the greater part of the Gulf of Mexico.
To say that the American farmer produced in 1907 a crop worth, at the farm, seven and one-half billions of dollars, conveys little idea of the magnitude of the harvest. A current magazine has couched the same estimate in less exact but in far more emphatic language:--
Suppose that all of last year's corn had been s.h.i.+pped to Europe; it would have required over four thousand express steamers of 18,000 tons register to deliver it. Suppose that the year's wheat had all been sent to save the Far East from a great famine: the largest fleet in the world, with its four hundred vessels of all sizes, would have required fifteen round trips to move it. Take tobacco,--such a minor crop that most people never think of it in connection with farming:-- if last year's tobacco crop had been made into cigars, the supply would have lasted 153,000 men for fifty years, each man smoking ten cigars a day.
The officials of the forestry service, in speaking of the great devastation caused by forest fires, make the startling a.s.sertion that a new navy of first-cla.s.s battle-s.h.i.+ps could be built for the sum lost during a few weeks in the fires that raged from the pines of Maine to the redwoods of California.
Figures used in this way are most effective, and yet probably nothing in argumentation is more tedious than too many of these descriptions of statistics coming close together. If numbers absolutely have to be indicated a great many times, even figures are likely to be less tiresome.
CONCRETENESS. General statements and abstract principles invariably weary an audience. Theories and generalities are usually too intangible to make much impression. Specific instances and concrete cases, however, are usually interesting. A vivid picture of real persons, things, and events is necessary to arouse the attention of an audience and cause them both to understand the argument and to give it their consideration. The slogan of a recent political campaign was not, ”Improved economic conditions for the laboring man”; it was, ”The full dinner pail.” The political orator who is urging the necessity for a larger navy on the ground that war is imminent does not speak of possible antagonists in such general terms as _foreign powers_; he specifies Germany, j.a.pan, and the other nations that he fears. The preacher who would really awaken the conscience of his church does not confine himself to such terms as _original sin_ and _weaknesses of the flesh_; he talks of _lying_, _stealing_, and _swearing_.
Compare the effectiveness of the following examples:--
People of the same race are more loyal to each other than to foreigners.
Blood is thicker than water.
Western farmers are demanding political recognition.
”No, I am not going to vote a straight ticket this year. If I do, my candidate must be in favor of some things I want.” That was the dictum of Franklin Taylor, Farmer, on Rural Route No. 12, ten miles from a western town. He is a type of thousands of other farmers in the West.
Business streets that were once commodious and impressive are now smoky and filthy.
Business streets that ten years after the great fire promised to be almost grant in the width and perspective are now mere smoky tunnels under the filth-dripping gridirons of the elevated railways.
The West is becoming more densely populated.
The center of population, now in Indiana, is traveling straight toward the middle point of Illinois. The center of manufacturing has reached only eastern Ohio, but is marching in a bee-line for Chicago.
In the following quotation Mr. Crisp, laying aside for the moment abstractions and generalities, and bringing his case down to a specific instance, gives a concrete ill.u.s.tration of how the protective tariff affects a single individual:
Will you tell how this protective tariff benefits our agricultural producers? I can show you--I think I can demonstrate clearly--how the tariff hurts them; and I defy any of you to show wherein they are benefited by a protective tariff.
Suppose a farmer in Minnesota has 5,000 bushels of wheat and a farmer in Georgia has 100 bales of cotton. That wheat at eighty cents a bushel is worth $4,000, and that cotton at eight cents a pound is worth $4,000. Let those producers s.h.i.+p their staples abroad. The Minnesota wheat-grower s.h.i.+ps his wheat to Liverpool; whether he s.h.i.+ps it there or not, that is where the price of his wheat is fixed. The Georgia cotton-raiser s.h.i.+ps his cotton to Liverpool; whether he s.h.i.+ps it there or not, that is where the price of his cotton is fixed. The wheat and the cotton are sold in that free trade market. The wheat is sold for $4,000; the cotton brings the same amount. The Minnesota farmer invests the $4,000 he has received for his wheat in clothing, crockery, iron, steel, dress goods, clothing,--whatever he may need for his family in Minnesota. The Georgia cotton-raiser invests the proceeds of his cotton in like kind of goods.
Each of those men s.h.i.+ps his goods to this country and they reach the port of New York. When either undertakes to unload them he is met by the collector of customs, who says, ”Let me see your invoice.” The invoice is exhibited, and it shows $4,000 worth of goods. Those goods represent in the one case 5,000 bushels of wheat, in the other case 100 bales of cotton. The collector at the port says to either of these gentlemen--the man who raises the wheat in Minnesota or him who raises the cotton in Georgia, ”You cannot bring into this market those goods for which you have exchanged your products unless you pay to the United States a tariff by the McKinley law--a tax of $2,000.”
FIGURES OF SPEECH. The use of figurative language is also an aid to clearness and to force. Simile, metaphor, personification, ant.i.thesis, balance, climax, rhetorical question, and repet.i.tion are all effective aids in the presentation of argument. The speeches of great orators are replete with expressions of this sort. Burke, in his _Speech on Conciliation_, says, ”Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster”; ”The public,” he said, ”would not have patience to see us play the game out with our adversaries; we must produce our hand”; ”Men may lose little in property by the act which takes away all their freedom. When a man is robbed of a trifle on the highway, it is not the twopence lost that const.i.tutes the capital outrage.” In speaking of certain provisions of the Const.i.tution, Webster says that they are the ”keystone of the arch.” The following paragraph is taken from his _Reply to Hayne_:--
And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure; it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.
_The Outlook_, in a recent issue, first states a vital question in literal and then, to drive home the meaning of the problem, in figurative language:--
Is the Const.i.tution of the United States a series of inflexible rules which can be changed only by the methods which those rules themselves prescribe, or is it the expression of certain political principles by which a living and growing Nation has resolved to guide itself in its life and growth? Is it an anchor which fastens the s.h.i.+p of state in one place, or a rudder to guide it on its voyage?
Sometimes figures of speech are used to such excess or in such incongruous combinations that they detract from the effectiveness of the debate in which they occur rather than add to it. The distance from a forceful figure to an absurd figure is so short that a debater has to be on his guard against using expressions that will impress his audience as ridiculous or even funny. A mixture of highly figurative language with literal language and commonplace ideas, and a mixture of several figures are especially to be guarded against. As an example of the extent to which figures may be mixed the following will serve:--