532 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ownership of the pigs or the ethnological character of the Gada- 

 renes ; or the propriety of meddling with other poeple's 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 propo- 

 sition. 



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 ob- 

 jects 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 (Impreg- 

 nable 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 neigh- 

 bors 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 sci- 

 ence, 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 rhetor- 

 ical 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 sar- 

 casm, the offender really has no right to cry out. Assuredly ridi- 

 cule 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 contra- 

 diction, to restrain those to whom " the extreme weapons of con- 

 troversy " 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. 



