I. I lay it down as a rule, but still reserving their peculiar rights and exceptions to young Scotchmen for whom daily disputing is a sort of daily bread, that the man who disputes is a monster, and that he ought to be expelled from civilized society. Or could not a compromise be effected for disputatious people, by allowing a private disputing room in all hotels, as they have private rooms for smoking? I have heard of two Englishmen, gentlemanly persons, but having a constitutional _furor_ for boxing, who quieted their fighting instincts in this way. It was not glory which they desired, but mutual punishment, given and taken with a hearty goodwill. Yet, as their feelings of refinement revolted from making themselves into a spectacle of partisanship for the public to bet on, they retired into a ball-room, and locked the doors, so that nothing could transpire of the campaigns within except from the desperate rallies and floorings which were heard, or from the bloody faces which were seen on their issuing. A limited admission, it was fancied, might have been allowed to select friends; but the courteous refusal of both parties was always 'No; the pounding was strictly confidential.' Now, pray, gentlemen disputers, could you not make your pounding 'strictly confidential'? My chief reasons for doing so I will mention: 1. That disputing is in bad tone; it is vulgar, and essentially the resource of uncultured people. 2. It argues want of intellectual power, or, in any case, want of intellectual development. It is because men find it easier to talk by disputing than by _not_ disputing that so many people resort to this coarse expedient for calling the wind into the sails of conversation. To move along in the key of contradiction is the cheapest of all devices for purchasing a power that is not your own. You are then carried along by a towing-line attached to another vessel. There is no free power. Always your antagonist predetermines the course of your own movement; and you his. What _he_ says, you unsay. He affirms, you deny. He knits, you unknit. Always you are servile to _him_; and he to _you_. Yet even that system of motion in reverse of another motion, of mere antistrophe or dancing backward what the strophe had danced forward, is better after all, you say, than standing stock still. For instance, it might have been tedious enough to hear Mr. Cruger disputing every proposition that Burke advanced on the Bristol hustings; yet even _that_ some people would prefer to Cruger's single observation, viz., 'I say _ditto_ to Mr. Burke.' Every man to his taste: I, for one, should have preferred Mr. Cruger's _ditto_.[1] But why need we have a _ditto_, a simple _affirmo_, because we have _not_ an eternal _nego_? The proper spirit of conversation moves in the general key of assent, but still not therefore of mere iteration, but still each bar of the music is different. Nature surely does not repeat herself, yet neither does she maintain the