To know just what is involved by applying the term to any given public man, one must go back to the recent history of his party in his own state, and to the speeches he has made.  In political discussions popular phrases are constantly thus blurred in meaning through being used as party catchwords; and to use them with any certainty in an argument one must thus go back to their origin, and then dissect out, as it were, the ambiguous implications which have grown into them.

If you were arguing any question concerning the elective system or the entrance requirements for your own college, you would often do well to sketch the history of the present system as a means of defining it, before you go on to urge that it be changed or kept as it is.  So if you were arguing for a further change in the football rules, your best definition of the present game for your purpose would be a sketch of the way in which the game has been changed in the past few years, at the urgent demand of public opinion.  Such a sketch you could easily get by running through the back numbers of such a magazine as Outing, or the sporting columns of some of the larger weeklies.  Or again, if you were arguing that the street railway systems of your city should be allowed to combine, your best description or definition of the present situation might well be a sketch of the successive steps by which it came to be what it is.  Here you would go for your material to the files of local newspapers, or, if you could get at them, to sets of the reports of the railway companies.

The definition of terms through the history of the question has the advantage that, besides helping your readers to see why the terms you use have the meaning you give them for the present case, it also makes them better judges of the question by giving them a full background.

Ambiguous definitions, which do not distinguish between two or more meanings of a term for the case under discussion, are usually avoided by going back to the history of the case.  In Chapter III we shall consider more fully the fallacies which spring from ambiguous use of words.  Here I shall insist briefly on the necessity of searching into the way terms have come to be used in specific discussions.

The first of these is the danger which arises when a word in general use takes on a special, almost technical meaning in connection with a particular subject.  Here you must take some pains to see that your readers understand it in the special sense, and not in the popular one.  A crass instance, in which there is little real possibility of confusion, is the use of words like “democratic” or “republican” as the names of political parties; even with these words stump speakers sometimes try to play on the feelings of an uneducated audience by importing the association of the original use of the word into its later use.  There are a good many words used in the scientific study of government which are also