n some cases the
easiest way to put before your readers the precise details or
limitations implied in a term is through a brief review of the history
of the question. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates Lincoln was constantly
showing that Douglas's use of the term "popular sovereignty" must be
understood in the light of the whole history of the slavery question;
that it meant one thing--what Douglas intended it to mean--if the
history of the question before 1850 were left out of sight; but that it
meant a wholly different thing if the steady encroachment of the slave
power from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 on were taken into account.
And Lincoln showed that in reality "popular sovereignty" had come to
mean a power oh the part of the people of a territory to introduce
slavery, but not to exclude it.[12] In our own day "progressive" has a
different meaning when applied to a Republican from Kansas and to one
from Massachusetts or New York.

To know just what is involved by applying the term to any given public
man, one must go back to the recent history of his party in his own
state, and to the speeches he has made. In political discussions popular
phrases are constantly thus blurred in meaning through being used as
party catchwords; and to use them with any certainty in an argument one
must thus go back to their origin, and then dissect out, as it were, the
ambiguous implications which have grown into them.

If you were arguing any question concerning the elective system or the
entrance requirements for your own college, you would often do well to
sketch the history of the present system as a means of defining it,
before you go on to urge that it be changed or kept as it is. So if you
were arguing for a further change in the football rules, your best
definition of the present game for your purpose would be a sketch of the
way in which the game has been changed in the past few years, at the
urgent demand of public opinion. Such a sketch you could easily get by
running through the back numbers of such a magazine as _Outing_, or the
sporting columns of some of the larger weeklies. Or again, if you were
arguing that the street railway systems of your city should be allowed
to combine, your best description or definition of the present situation
might well be a sketch of the successive steps by which it came to be
what it is. Here you would go for your material to the files of local
newspapers, or, if you could get at them, to