they are what they are, and will always remain what they
are." He meant that there are some human beings--and these Slavs of the
number--who are mentally irredeemable, so fast asleep intellectually
that they cannot be awakened; designed by nature, therefore, to be
hewers of wood and drawers of water. This cruel and wicked thing was
said of Slavs; it is the same thing which has been said from time
immemorial by the slave owners of their slaves. First they degrade human
beings by denying them the opportunity to develop their better nature:
no schools, no teaching, no freedom, no outlook; and then, as if in
mockery, they point to the degraded condition of their victims as a
reason why they should never be allowed to escape from it.[52]

In a diffuse and disorderly argument there is always a chance to find
some begging of the question which may consist either of getting back to
an assumption of the original proposition and so arguing in a circle, or
of simply assuming that what has been asserted has been proved. The
fallacy of the invented example, in which a fictitious case is described
as an illustration, and presently assumed as a real case, is a not
uncommon form of begging the question.

48. Ignoring the Question. This is a closely allied error in
reasoning that is apt to be due to the same kind of confused and woolly
thinking. It consists in slipping away from the question in debate and
arguing vigorously at something else. A famous exposure of the fallacy
is Macaulay's denunciation of the arguments in favor of Charles I:

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors
against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all
controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling
testimony as to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James
the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest
enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what,
after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not
more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded,
and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones
in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good
husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution,
tyranny, and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told
that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of ha