opinion, in which an argument is of no practical value.

The second class of subjects, those for which the material is drawn
wholly from reading, is the most common in intercollegiate and
interscholastic debates. Should the United States army canteen be
restored, Should the Chinese be excluded from the Philippines, Should
the United States establish a parcels post, are all subjects with which
the ordinary student in high school or college can have little personal
acquaintance. The sources for arguments on such subjects are to be found
in books, magazines, and official reports. The good you will get from
arguments on such subjects lies largely in finding out how to look up
material. The difficulty with them lies in their size and their
complexity. When it is remembered that a column of an ordinary newspaper
has somewhere about fifteen hundred words, and that an editorial article
such as on page 268, which is thirty-eight hundred words long, is in
these days of hurry apt to be repellent, because of its length, and on
the other hand that a theme of fifteen hundred words seems to the
ordinary undergraduate a weighty undertaking, the nature of this
difficulty becomes clear. To put it another way, speeches on public
subjects of great importance are apt to be at least an hour long, and
not infrequently more, and in an hour one easily speaks six or seven
thousand words, so that fifteen hundred words would not fill a
fifteen-minute speech. This difficulty is met in debates by the longer
time allowed, for each side ordinarily has an hour; but even then there
can be no pretense of a thorough treatment. The ordinary written
argument of a student in school or college can therefore do very little
with large public questions. The danger is that a short argument on a
large question may breed in one an easy content with a superficial and
parrotlike discussion of the subject. Discussions of large and abstract
principles are necessary, but they are best left to the time of life