usher in their scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half a dozen false concords."

Mr. Buckle, in his "History of Civilization in England," does not hesitate to express the opinion that "our great English scholars have corrupted the English language by jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled dialect strives to hide." He then adds that the principal reason why well-educated women write and converse in a purer style than well-educated men, is "because they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted for them." To nearly the same effect is the declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition,you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the women's letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on "Paradise Lost"? What prose style, always excepting that of the Areopagitica, is worse for imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved, half-rhythmical periods, "dragging, like a wounded snake, their slow length along"? Yet Bentley and Milton, whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek literature through and through, were probably the profoundest classical scholars that England can boast.

CHAPTER X.

THE FALLACIES IN WORDS.

Gardons-nous de l'équivoque! - PAUL LOUIS COURIER.

Words are grown so false, I am loathe to prove reason with them.— SHAKSPEARE.

The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.- HOOKER.

One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt;

One trivial letter ruins all, left out;

A knot can choke a felon into clay;

A knot will save him, spelt without the k;

The smallest word has some unguarded spot,

And danger lurks in i without a dot.-O. W. HOLMES.

N some of the great American rivers, where lumber

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ing operations are carried on, the logs, in floating down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter down. the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his terms accurately, performs for the dead-locked questions of the day. Half the controversies of the world are disputes about words. How often do we see two persons engage in what Cowper calls "a duel in the form of a debate," tilting furiously at each other for hours,— slashing with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hooking with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites, with no apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means

by a term on which the discussion hinges; when it is found that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions,— that is, such as may be taken in two different meanings, using a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a controversy turns is unconsciously made to do double duty, and under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately to define such a term is to provide one's self with a masterkey which unlocks the whole dispute.

Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the Middle Ages, and which, beginning with words, came at last to blows? Yet, properly understood, they maintained only opposite poles of the same truth; and were, therefore, both right, and both wrong. The Nominalists, it has been said, only denied what no one in his senses would affirm, and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair's breadth parted those who, had they understood each other's language, would have had no altercation. Again, who can tell how far the clash of opinions among political economists has been owing to the use in opposite senses of a very few words? Had Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus, M'Culloch, Mill, began framing their systems by defining carefully the meanings attached by them to certain terms used on every page of their writings, such as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value, Supply and Demand, Over-trading,-it may be doubted whether they would not, to some extent, have harmonized in opinion, instead of giving us theories as opposite as the poles.

How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity of the word money, which, instead of being a simple and indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different meanings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or both together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for loan. A merchant is said to fail "for lack of money," when, in fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or merchandise, money having no more to do with the matter than the carts or railway wagons by which the merchandise is transported. Again: money is spoken of as yielding interest, which it cannot do, since wherever it is, whether in a bank, in one's pocket, or in a safe, it is dead capital. The confusion of the terms wealth and money gave birth to "the mercantile system," one of the greatest curses that ever befell Europe. As in popular language to grow rich is to accumulate money, and to grow poor is to lose money, this term became a synonyme for wealth; and, till recently, at least, all the nations of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. To accomplish this they prohibited the exportation of money, gave bounties on the importation, and restricted the importation of other commodities, expecting thus to produce "a favorable balance of trade,"--a conduct as wise as that of a shop-keeper who should sell his goods only for money, and hoard every dollar, instead of replacing and increasing his stock, or putting his surplus capital at interest. France, under Colbert, acted upon this principle, and Voltaire extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the accumulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for articles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The effect of this fallacy has been to make the nations regard the wealth of their customers as a source of loss instead of

profit, and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a blessing, by which the improvement of Europe has been more retarded than by all other causes put together.

So with the mortal theological wars in which so much ink has been shed. The shelves of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never would have been published but for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the meaning of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,- terms vital in theology, the more they argued, the farther they were apart, and while fancying they were battling with real adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or fighting with shadows, till at last utter "Confusion umpire sat,

And by deciding worse embroiled the fray."

The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, touching the doctrine of efficacious" and "sufficient" grace. question was, "Whether all men received from God sufficient grace for their conversion?" The Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted that this sufficient grace would never be efficacious, unless accompanied by special grace. "Then the sufficient grace, which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms," cried the Jesuits; "and, besides, it is a heresy!" We need not trace the

The