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 when one has a comprehensive and intimate knowledge of the whole mass of facts concerned.
By far the best kind of subject, as has been said, is that which will combine some personal acquaintance with the facts and the possibility of some research for material. Many such subjects may be found in the larger educational questions when applied to your own school or college. Should the elective system be maintained at Harvard College, Should the University of Illinois require Latin for the A.B. degree, Should fraternities be abolished in—— High School, Should manual training be introduced in—— High School, are all questions of this sort. A short list of similar questions is printed at the end of this section, which it is hoped will prove suggestive. For discussing these questions you will find considerable printed material in educational and other magazines, in reports of presidents of colleges and school committees, and other such places, which will give you practice in hunting up facts and opinions and in weighing their value. At the same time training of your judgment will follow when you apply the theories and opinions you find in these sources to local conditions. Moreover, such questions will give you practice in getting material in the raw, as it were, by making up tables of statistics from catalogues, by getting facts by personal interview, and in other ways, which will be considered in Chapter II. Finally, such subjects are much more likely to be of a size that you can bring to a head in the space and the time allowed to the average student, and they may have some immediate and practical effect in determining a question in which your own school or college has an interest. Arguments on such subjects are therefore less likely to be "academic" discussions, in the sense of having no bearing on any real conditions. When every college and school has plenty of such subjects continually under debate, there seems to be no reason for going farther and faring worse.
The main thing is to get a subject which will carry you back to facts, and one in which you will be able to test your own reasoning.
6. Suggestions of Subjects for Practice. Many of the subjects in the list below will need some adaptation to fit them to local conditions; and these will undoubtedly suggest many others of a similar nature. Other subjects of immediate and local interest may be drawn from the current newspapers; and the larger, perennial ones like prohibition, woman suffrage, immigration laws, are always at the disposal of those who have the time and the courage for the amount of reading they involve. The distinction between a subject and the proposition to be argued will be made in Chapter II.
SUGGESTIONS FOR SUBJECTS OF ARGUMENTS
TO BE ADAPTED TO LOCAL AND PRESENT CONDITIONS
1. Admission to this college should be by examination only.
2. The entrance requirements of this college set a good standard for a public high-school course.
3. Admission to this college should be by certificate from the candidate's school, such as is now accepted at—— College.
4. The standards for admission to this college or to the State University should be raised.
5. The standard for graduating from this college should be raised.
6. Attendance at chapel exercises should be made voluntary.
7. The numbers of students in this college should be limited by raising the standard for admission.
8. A reading knowledge of French or of German, to be tested by an oral examination, should be substituted for the present requirements for entrance in those languages.
9. No list of books should be prescribed for the entrance examination in English.
10. Freshmen should be required to be within bounds by eleven o'clock at night.
11. Freshmen should not be elected to college societies.
12. Students who have attained distinction in their studies should be treated as graduate students are, in respect to attendance and leave of absence.
13. Arrangements should be made by which the work done on college papers should count toward the degree.
14. The honor system in examinations should be introduced into this college.
15. The course of study in this college should be made wholly elective.
16. Coeducation should be maintained in this college.
17. Secret societies should be prohibited in—— High School.
18. The business course in—— High School should be given up.
19. Compulsory military drill should be introduced into—— School (or, into this college).
20. Greek should be given up in—— School.
21. All students in—— School, whether in the business course or not, should be required to study Latin.
22. Athletics have had a detrimental effect on the studies of those who have taken part in them.
23.——School should engage in athletic contests with two other schools only.
24. The school committee in—— should be reduced to five members.
25. The school committee in—— is at present too large for efficient direction of the schools.
26. The principal of the high school in—— should report directly to the school committee and not to the superintendent of schools.
27. This city should assign a sum equal to—— mills of the whole tax rate to the support of the public schools.
28. The high school of this city should have a single session each day, instead of two.
29. This city should substitute a commission government on the general model of that in Des Moines, Iowa, for the present system.
30. The