" taking half a dozen.

CHAPTER XV

DEBATING

Really great debaters, like the animal reconstructed, as Bret Harte
relates, before "The Society on the Stanislaw," are "extremely rare."
This is because the great debater must have a number of accomplishments
any one of which requires something very closely approaching genius.

The great debater must first of all be a brilliant speaker; but he must
also be a speaker of a certain kind. Many brilliant speakers are utterly
helpless in debate. The most helpless of these is the speaker who is
bound closely to his fully written manuscript or who departs from it
only by memorizing the sentences.

A certain preacher in a double walled brick church found a chink in the
inner wall just back of the pulpit. He found this crevice a convenient
pigeon hole for his carefully written and always excellent sermon during
the preliminary parts of the service. While the congregation sang the
last verse of the hymn preceding the sermon he would draw it from its
hiding place and lay it on the pulpit. One fatal Sunday he pushed it too
far in and it fell between the two walls hopelessly beyond immediate
recovery. His anguish during the last verse as the novelists say,
"beggared description." He read a chapter from the Bible and dismissed
his flock. One cannot imagine such a speaker, brilliant as he was with
his pages before him, achieving any success in debate.

The qualities of a great debater may be ranged under two heads: (1)
general, (2) technical. The general qualifications must be those of a
ready speaker, fully master of his subject and able to think quickly and
clearly and to clothe an idea in forceful, suitable language on very
short notice. The ability to detect a flaw in an opponent's case does
not consist merely in cleverness, but will depend upon the thoroughness
of your studies before going on the platform.

The great debater must go to the bottom of things. It is all very well
to take an opponent's speech and reply to it point by point, even to the
last detail. It is vastly better, however, if you can lay your hands on
the fundamental fallacy that underlies the whole case and explode that.

I well remember my debate with Bolton Hall. Mr. Hall's whole case rested
on the theory of the existence of certain Nature-given and God-given
rights of man. The apostles of the Single Tax from George down never
knew and probably never will know how completely all this has been swept