The Dred Scott Decision expressly gives every citizen of the United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter, was cleared from it, away - all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity: no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. Clear it of all the verbiage, and that is the naked truth of his proposition - that a thing may be lawfully driven from the place where it has a lawful right to stay.1

In testing evidence to determine whether it is consistent with experience, we must at the same time ask how nearly complete is our known experience. The apparent consistency may be due merely to the paucity of experience. And in testing evidence to determine whether it contradicts known facts of the case, we must be sure that what we regard as facts are established as such by adequate proof.

In the following argument, Burke exposes an inconsistency in the arguments of those who supported the trade laws and the revenue laws:

The more moderate among the opposers of parliamentary concession freely confess that they hope no good from taxation; but they apprehend the colonists have further views, and if this point were conceded, they would instantly attack the trade laws.

I am, however, Sir, not a little surprised at this kind of discourse whenever I hear it; and I am the more surprised on account of the arguments which I constantly find in company with it, and which are often urged from the same mouths, and on the same day.

For instance, when we allege that it is against reason to tax 1 Lincoln's Complete Works, The Century Company, vol. i, p. 551.

a people under so many restraints in trade as the Americans, the Noble Lord in the Blue Ribbon shall tell you that the restraints on trade are futile and useless; of no advantage to us, and of no burthen to those on whom they are imposed; that the trade to America is not secured by the Acts of Navigation, but by the natural and irresistible advantage of a commercial preference.

Such is the merit of the trade laws in this posture of the debate. But when strong internal circumstances are urged against the taxes; when the scheme is dissected; when experience and the nature of things are brought to prove, and do prove, the utter impossibility of obtaining an effective revenue from the Colonies; when these things are pressed, or rather press themselves, so as to drive the advocates of Colony taxes to a clear admission of the futility of the scheme

then, Sir, the sleeping trade laws revive from their trance; and this useless taxation is to be kept sacred, not for its own sake, but as a counter-guard and security of the laws of trade.

Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischievous, in order to preserve trade laws that are useless. Such is the wisdom of our plan in both its members. They are separately given up as of no value; and yet one is always to be defended for the sake of the other.

The following argument illustrates the method frequently adopted to refute the contentions in favor of Protection:

The argument in favor of protection drawn from the dangers of free competition produces a great impression. But note what singular changes this argument has undergone, and to what contradictions it leads! Formerly it was maintained that the weak must be protected against the strong, the young countries against the old. Thompson, for instance, declared that protection aims to overcome the initial obstacles in the way of founding new and diversified industries. This was known as tutelary protection, designed to educate labor and capital in hitherto untried occupations, and in the United

States was known as "protection to infant industries." But the United States has brilliantly accomplished its economic evolution in this respect, and now ranks among the greatest manufacturing nations of the earth. And now that the nation is strong industrially, and its "infant industries" have been fostered to maturity, has it torn down the protective barrier which sheltered them in their infancy? By no means! Mr. David A. Wells declares expressly that "there has never been an instance in the history of the country where the representatives of such infant industries, who have enjoyed protection for a long series of years, have been willing to submit to a reduction of the tariff, or have proposed it. But on the contrary, their demands for still higher duties are insatiable and never intermitted." Americans continue the protectionist policy, and at the same time abandon the infant industry argument as unworthy of a great industrial nation. By an inverse argument they now declare that a nation that is advanced in civilization, that is wealthy and in the habit of paying high wages to its laborers, must be protected against nations possessing a retrograde civilization and paying low wages for labor.

Meanwhile, the nations of Europe declare that a high tariff barrier is indispensable to them precisely because they are old and require protection against the dangerous competition of new countries possessing the advantages of a cheap virgin soil and low wages.

Hence, free traders ask: What conclusion must be drawn from this varied application of the protectionist argument? To whom is protection really necessary? Do the weak need it against the strong, or the strong against the weak? Do new countries require it against old ones, or the old against the new? What are we to think of an argument that is made to serve equally well for the defense of two exactly opposite doctrines ? 1

6. Turning the Tables. - Especially effective in refutation is the method of taking over the argument of

1 Arranged from Gide's Political Economy, translation by C. W. A Veditz, pp. 331-333. D. C. Heath & Co., 1904.

an opponent and showing that it tends to prove not his case but your own. Thus Lincoln, in his Cooper Union speech, said:

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of the government, upon that subject, up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he wrote Lafayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free states.

Bearing this in mind and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it.1

V. TWO ESSENTIALS OF REFUTATION

After all, although the study of these special methods should prove suggestive, there are but two fundamental requisites of effective refutation, — the power of keen thinking and a thorough knowledge of both sides of the question. Neither of these essentials is possessed by those who regard debating as the recitation of memorized speeches, consisting of strings of quotations from

1 Delivered at Cooper Union, New York City, February, 1860. Lincoln's Complete Works, The Century Company, vol. i, p. 606. An equally good example is included in the eighth section of the tenth chapter of this book.

other men. Such parrot-like performances should not parade under the name of debating. They are not even preparation for debating. Indeed, it is an open question whether they do not hinder more than they help, and it is altogether true that they contribute nothing to the power of adapting refutation to the needs of the moment the one power which fundamentally distinguishes the debater from the elocutionist. Any study which develops the faculty of independent and sound thinking prepares a man for the work of refutation; and when to this general training he adds an accurate and wide knowledge of the particular subject for argument, quite regardless of the material he may expect to need for a given speech, he possesses the two essentials of effective refutation.