y, just as in the former illustration the rules of
writing correctly follow a certain practice rather than precede it.

Now it has long seemed to me that the best way of teaching carefulness
and precision in dealing with propositions might be found through the
medium of the argumentation in the courts of justice. This is
reasoning in real matter. There is a famous book well known to legal
students--_Smith's Leading Cases_--which contains a selection of
important decisions, and sets forth the grounds on which the courts
arrived at them. I have often thought that a dozen or a score of cases
might be collected from this book into a small volume, that would make
such a manual as no other matter could, for opening plain men's eyes
to the logical pitfalls among which they go stumbling and crashing,
when they think they are disputing like Socrates or reasoning like
Newton. They would see how a proposition or an expression that looks
straightforward and unmistakable, is yet on examination found to be
capable of bearing several distinct interpretations and meaning
several distinct things; how the same evidence may warrant different
conclusions, and what kinds of evidence carry with them what degrees
of validity: how certain sorts of facts can only be proved in one way,
and certain other sorts of facts in some other way: how necessary it
is, before you set out, to know exactly what it is you intend to show,
or what it is you intend to dispute; how there may be many
argumentative objections to a proposition, yet the balance be in
favour of its adoption. It is from the generality of people having
neglected to practise the attention on these and the like matters,
that interest and prejudice find so ready an instrument of sophistry
in that very art of speech which ought to be the organ of reason and
truth. To bring the matter to a point, then, I submit that it might
be worth while in this and all such institutions to have a class for
the study of Logic, Reasoning, Evidence, and that such a class might
well find its best material in selections from Leading Cases, and from
Bentham's _Rationale of Judicial Evidence_, elucidated by those
special sections in Mill's _Logic_, or smaller manuals such as those
of Mr. Fowler, the Oxford Professor of Logic, which treat of the
department of Fallacies. Perhaps Bentham's _Book of Fallacies_ is too
political for me to commend it to you here. But if there happens to be
any one in Birmingham who is f