its audience; and an instructor will be wise to keep himself awake to
this truth by noting divergencies from the model. The rules which are
here set forth and the model which is built on them are serviceable just
so long as they are serviceable, and no longer. Their chief service is
done when they have set up in the minds of students a standard of
effectiveness in singling out and emphasizing the critical issues of a
question.

As to the exercises which should accompany the work in argument my
experience with classes of five to six hundred freshmen leads me to
think that their value to the student can hardly be overestimated. I
will speak here of a few of them.

The exercises in the use of reference books is something that every
student ought to be put through. I found it simple and not too
extravagant of time to take my sections to the library in squads of ten
or a dozen, and show them and let them handle the principal books on the
list. Then on the spot I gave each of them a sheet of theme paper on
which I had written some sort of fact drawn from one of these books, and
told them to look up that fact and report on it. My object was to
convince them that most ordinary facts can be looked up in less than
five minutes. The material for this exercise I got by turning over the
reference books and jotting down almost anything that caught my eye. One
can in this way get a great variety of facts in a very short time. In
some libraries it might be possible to get members of the library staff
to share in this instruction; in all libraries one will find active
cooperation.

For the preliminary work on the argument we found that it was often
practicable and advisable to let the students pair off on the two sides
of the question, and work together through all the preliminaries. Two
men thus working together often discuss themselves into the liveliest
kind of interest in their question; and almost always they come closer
to the important issues involved by sharpening their wits against each
other. Their arguments, too, are better, especially in the refutation,
from their knowing just what points can be made on the other side.

It is excellent practice, not only for the brief and the argument, but
also for all other college work, to set the students to making briefs of
parts or wholes of the arguments printed here as examples, or of other
arguments found outside. Not only lawyers, but other men of affairs,
constantly have to d