think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never for an instant been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking or sleeping their devastating crash has been blasting the air across within a mile or two, and this from an artillery so terrible that each discharge beats as it were a wedge of shock between the skull-bone and the brain. Let him think too that never, for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes more may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him, a place where he will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few remnants and a little identification-disc flapping on his bones in the wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and rattle of the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that has long been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the scream of shells passing like great cats of death in the air; let him see the slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into the white, yellow, and black smokes of great explosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs marking the hill in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends, and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.1 What light does the following paragraph which appears at the beginning of the book throw upon the controlling purpose? Later, when there was leisure, I began to consider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort, which came, more than once, very near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times, and failed, in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed, from something which had nothing to do with arms nor with the men who bore them. That 1 John Masefield: Gallipoli. By courtesy of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, New York City. the effort failed is not against it; much that is most splendid in military history failed, many great things and noble men have failed. To myself, this failure is the second grand event of the war; the first was Belgium's answer to the German ultimatum.1 X. Explain what would be your controlling purpose in a theme on any of the following subjects, and how you would arrange your material to accomplish this purpose. 1. What is the Primary Function of a Successful Novel? 2. The Philosophy of Woman Suffrage. 3. Lynch Law and Law Reform. 4. The Conservatism of the American College Student. 6. A Mediæval Free City. 7. Mr. Roosevelt's Career as an Index of the American Character. 8. Practical Efficiency as an Enemy to "Sweetness and Light." 9. The Esthetics of the Skyscraper. 10. Possibilities for the Small Farmer in America. 11. The Future of Civil Engineering. 12. Housekeeping as an Exact Science. XI. Indicate what your controlling purpose would be in writing of the following subjects, if you chose your purpose from the subject-matter alone. Then show how the purpose might be affected by the different sets of readers as they are indicated in the subheadings. 1. The Intelligence of the Average Voter. a. For a woman who eagerly desires woman suffrage. b. For a refined but narrow aristocrat, descendant of an old family. c. For an agitating member of the I.W.W. 2. The Value of Courses in Literature for the Technical Student. a. For a hard-headed civil engineer. b. For a white-haired, kindly old professor of Greek, who resents the intrusion of science and labor. c. For a mother who wants her son to "get everything good from his technical course." 3. The Delights of Fishing. a. For a woman who cannot understand why her husband b. For a group of city men who are devotees of the sport. 4. The Value of the Civic Center. a. For a man who resents the extra taxation that would be necessary to make one in his city. b. For a prominent, public-spirited architect. 1 John Masefield: Gallipoli. By courtesy of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, New York City. c. For a young woman graduate from college who eagerly desires to "do something" for her city. 5. The Spirit of the "Middle West," the "Old South" or any other section of the country. a. For a proud resident. b. For a sniffy resident of another section. c. For a person who has never thought of such a thing. CHAPTER III DEFINITION DEFINITION is the process of explaining a subject by setting bounds to it, enclosing it within its limits, showing its extent. The ocean is properly defined by the shore; a continent or island is defined by its coastline: shores set limits to the ocean; coastlines bound the island or continent. So, when a child asks, "What is Switzerland?" you show on the map the pink or yellow or green space that is included within certain definite boundaries. These boundaries set a limit to the extent of that country; in other words, they define it. As soon as a traveler steps beyond the limit of that country, he is at once in another realm, has become identified with a quite different set of conditions and circumstances - he is, in fact, in a country that has a different definition from that of Switzerland. In the same way, when some one asks what truth is, or nickel steel, or a grand piano, or humanism, or art, or rotation of crops, or a rocking chair, or the forward pass, you attempt, in your reply, to set bounds to the thing in question, to restrict it, to fence it off, to state the line beyond which if it goes it ceases to be one thing and becomes another. It is by no means always an easy task to find this line. Many a child has come to grief in his attempts to keep safely within the limits of truth and yet be close up to the realm of desirable falsehood. Likewise many witnesses in court have been beguiled or browbeaten into crossing the line without knowing that they were getting into the country of the enemy. But thoug the quest for the line may be difficult, a true definition must set off the thing being defined from other things, must set bounds to it, enclose it within its limits, show its extent. The Process of Definition The logical process of defining consists of two steps: first, stating the class or group to which the object of definition belongs, as to say that Switzerland is a country, the forward pass is a strategic device in football, humanism is a philosophy of personal development; and second, pointing out the difference between the object of definition and other members of the class, showing how it is distinguished from them. Since the purpose of definition is to limit the thing defined, the practical value of the first step is at once apparent. If, in total ignorance, a resident of India asks you, "What is ragtime?" the most helpful thing in the world that you can do for him is to cleave away with one stroke everything else in the world but music-absolute exclusion of all other human interests and place ragtime in that comparatively narrow field. That is the first thing of great help. However many qualities you may attribute to ragtime, whether you call it inspiring, invigorating, pleasing, detestable, or what not, you are making at best only slow progress toward defining, really limiting ragtime. The number of pleasing things, for example, is so endless, and the things are so diverse in character that your listener is almost as ignorant after such a quality has been attributed as he was before. But the moment that you limit ragtime to music you scatter untold clouds of doubt and place the inquirer in the comfortable position of having a fairly large working knowledge. What is left for the inquirer to do is merely to distinguish ragtime from other kinds of music - after all a rather simple task. Likewise in any definition, such as that of rotation of crops, the first necessity is to place the subject in its proper field, in this case agriculture; the grand piano in the class of musical instruments; the rocking chair in the class of furniture. Now sometimes the task of discovering to what class your |