thin except from the
desperate rallies and floorings which were heard, or from the bloody
faces which were seen on their issuing. A limited admission, it was
fancied, might have been allowed to select friends; but the courteous
refusal of both parties was always 'No; the pounding was strictly
confidential.' Now, pray, gentlemen disputers, could you not make your
pounding 'strictly confidential'? My chief reasons for doing so I will
mention:

1. That disputing is in bad tone; it is vulgar, and essentially the
resource of uncultured people.

2. It argues want of intellectual power, or, in any case, want of
intellectual development. It is because men find it easier to talk by
disputing than by _not_ disputing that so many people resort to this
coarse expedient for calling the wind into the sails of conversation. To
move along in the key of contradiction is the cheapest of all devices
for purchasing a power that is not your own. You are then carried along
by a towing-line attached to another vessel. There is no free power.
Always your antagonist predetermines the course of your own movement;
and you his. What _he_ says, you unsay. He affirms, you deny. He knits,
you unknit. Always you are servile to _him_; and he to _you_. Yet even
that system of motion in reverse of another motion, of mere antistrophe
or dancing backward what the strophe had danced forward, is better after
all, you say, than standing stock still. For instance, it might have
been tedious enough to hear Mr. Cruger disputing every proposition that
Burke advanced on the Bristol hustings; yet even _that_ some people
would prefer to Cruger's single observation, viz., 'I say _ditto_ to Mr.
Burke.' Every man to his taste: I, for one, should have preferred Mr.
Cruger's _ditto_.[1] But why need we have a _ditto_, a simple _affirmo_,
because we have _not_ an eternal _nego_? The proper spirit of
conversation moves in the general key of assent, but still not therefore
of mere iteration, but still each bar of the music is different. Nature
surely does not repeat herself, yet neither does she maintain the
eternal variety of her laughing beauty by constantly contradicting
herself, and quite as little by monotonously repeating herself. Her
samenesses are differences.

II. Of the evils of garrulity, which, like the ceaseless droppings
of water, will eat into the toughest rock of patience and
self-satisfaction, I have spoken at considerable length elsewhere. Its
evils ar