Still, we are not convinced. We were never convinced of anything in our lives, and never intend to be convinced, for excellent reasons. It is said there were once seven wise men—a matter which may be very well doubted. But, admitting this point, it was of course one of the seven who first promulgated the fact that every question has two sides. Late discoveries have assured us that it would be no question at all if it had not. Some questions, indeed, are trigonal, or quadrigonal, or pentagonal, or sexagonal, or septagonal, or octagonal, or nonagonal. Some even are polygonal, while others have an infinity of sides like the mathematical circle, and thus there is found to be no end to them at all, as is the case with the ordinary circle which every body understands. These latter are questions about Tariffs, and Boundary Lines, and National Banks, questions of privilege and drivel-ege, and Congressional questions of order and disorder, with other matters of that kind. Most queries, however, appear at first glance to have no more than two sides; and it is only when we get hard and fast in the middle of an argument respecting them, so that it is as wrong to go back as it is preposterous to go forward, that we perceive each of the two sides which had appeared to a cursory view so staid and so definite, branching off, like gamblers at _Vingt Un_, into an infinitesimal series of little divisions, each as distinct and each as perverse as the original ones. For this reason and others (reasons _are_ as plenty as blackberries, John Falstaff to the contrary notwithstanding) for this reason and a thousand others, we keep clear of all argumentative discourses, as it is impossible to say when or where they may end. By keeping clear of them, we mean to say that we never indulge in them ourselves. Yet we like them very well in other people. Nothing amuses us more, for instance, than a young man who fancies himself a genius in the logical line, and who will take it upon himself, at a moment’s warning, to demonstrate that two and three blue beans do not make five. We could listen to him by the hour; and when at length he comes to find out that the blue-bean question, pretty much like all other questions, is one of the polygonal species with infinitesimal sides, we hardly know a more interesting object than he becomes, especially if you have not been so impolite as to interrupt him, and he has had all the discourse to himself.