argument which are sure to be
profitable may be divided into three classes: (1) those for which the
material is drawn from personal experience; (2) those for which the
material is provided by reading; and (3) those which combine the first
two. Of these there can be no question that the last are the most
profitable. Of the first class we may take for an example such a
question as, Should interscholastic athletics be maintained in----
school? Here is a question on which some parents and teachers at any
rate will disagree with most boys, and a question which must be settled
one way or the other. The material for the discussion must come from the
personal knowledge of those who make the arguments, reenforced by what
information and opinion they can collect from teachers and townspeople.
In Chapter II we shall come to a consideration of possible sources for
material for these and other arguments. There is much to be said for the
practice gained by hunting up pertinent material for arguments of this
sort; but they tend to run over into irreconcilable differences of
opinion, in which an argument is of no practical value.

The second class of subjects, those for which the material is drawn
wholly from reading, is the most common in intercollegiate and
interscholastic debates. Should the United States army canteen be
restored, Should the Chinese be excluded from the Philippines, Should
the United States establish a parcels post, are all subjects with which
the ordinary student in high school or college can have little personal
acquaintance. The sources for arguments on such subjects are to be found
in books, magazines, and official reports. The good you will get from
arguments on such subjects lies largely in finding out how to look up
material. The difficulty with them lies in their size and their
complexity. When it is remembered that a column of an ordinary newspaper
has somewhere about fifteen hundred words, and that an editorial article
such as on page 268, which is thirty-eight hundred words long, is in
these days of hurry apt to be repellent, because of its length, and on
the other hand that a theme of fifteen hundred words seems to the
ordinary undergraduate a weighty undertaking, the nature of this
difficulty becomes clear. To put it another way, speeches on public
subjects of great importance are apt to be at least an hour long, and
not infrequently more, and in an hour one easily speaks six or seven
thousand words, so