Thank you for drinking my health, gentlemen—you ask me whether we have any such thing as a clam-bake in Philadelphia—bless my soul! if we had, it wouldn’t be such a place for riots, broken banks, and all sorts of other eccentricities. Starvation was the cause of the French Revolution—to the fogs of England can be traced the suicides there—and it’s my candid belief that the absence of clam-bakes whereat to recreate is the prime origin of the present difficulties. Don’t ask me to demonstrate my position, for I hate logic as I hate olives and old maids. Assertion, sirs, is everything—a neat, portable affair that unrolls in a moment, and can’t be turned into a dozen aspects like shot silk. No, no, if a man ain’t convinced by a round assertion call him a fool, and if he resents it knock him down. There’s more evil come upon the world from the habit of reasoning than a thousand penitents, walking around the globe with pebbles in their shoes, could redeem. If two friends disagree, what is the cause? Argument. If a man quarrels with his wife, it’s because he stopped to reason with her. Bow deprecatingly, though with suavity, in the first case: kiss your wife and call her angel in the second case—and you keep your friend and helpmate; but get into an argument, and you are booked for a maelstrom from which St. Peter couldn’t save you. The Transcendentalists understand this matter: _they_ never argue. They lay down something which they themselves can’t understand, and then call on the gaping disciple to give credence to it: if they are believed, it is well; if not, they jabber a jargon of shibboleth, call him a world-deluded gull, and turn away talking of the light within, and the glories of Pantheism. And so with the ladies, dear creatures, whom Nature intends for peace-makers, and, therefore, never allows them to give any better reason for what they do than “because”—thereby saving them a world of trouble about major and minor premises, and other things “in concatenation accordingly.” Glory be to the man who first invented assertion!—may the author of logic go to thunder, whence he came.