Arguments of policy are of endless variety, for we are all of us making them all the time, from the morning hour in which we argue with ourselves, so often ineffectually, that we really ought to get up when the clock strikes, to the arguments about choosing a profession or helping to start a movement for universal peace.  It would be a weariness to the flesh to attempt a classification of them that should pretend to be exhaustive; but there are certain major groups of human motive which will be a good basis for a rough, but convenient, sorting out of the commoner kinds of arguments of policy.  In practical affairs we ask first if there is any principle of right or wrong involved, then what is best for the practical interests of ourselves and other people, and in a few cases, when these other considerations are irrelevant, what course is dictated by our ideas of fitness and beauty.  I will briefly discuss a few of the main types of the argument of policy, grouping them according as they appeal chiefly to the sense of right and wrong, to practical interests, or to aesthetic interests.

There are many arguments outside of sermons which turn on questions of right and wrong.  Questions of individual personal conduct we had better not get into; but every community, whether large or small, has often to face questions in which moral right and wrong are essentially involved.  In this country the whole question of dealing with the sale of alcoholic drinks is recognized as such.  The supporters of state prohibition declare that it is morally wrong to sanction a trade out of which springs so much misery; the supporters of local option and high license, admitting and fighting against all this misery and crime, declare that it is morally wrong to shut one’s eyes to the uncontrolled sales and the political corruption under state-wide prohibition.  The strongest arguments for limiting by law the hours of labor for women and children have always been based on moral principles; and all arguments for political reform hark back to the Ten Commandments.  One has the strongest of all arguments if he can establish a moral right and wrong in the question.

The difficulty comes in establishing the right and wrong, for there are many cases where equally good people are fighting dead against each other.  The question of prohibition, as we have just seen, is one of those cases; the slavery question was a still more striking one.  From before the Revolution the feeling that slavery was morally wrong slowly but steadily gained ground in the North, until from 1850 it became more and more a dominant and passionate conviction.[1] Yet in the South, which, as we must now admit, bred as many men and women of high devotion to the right, this view had only scattered followers.  On both sides tradition and environment molded the moral principle.  In arguing, therefore, one must not be too swift in calling on heaven to witness to the right; we must recognize that mortal vision is weak, and that some of the people whom we are fighting are borne on by principles as sincerely held to be righteous as our own.