The Audience.  Debaters must remember that in practically no circumstances outside legislative bodies are the audience and the judges ever the same.  Debaters argue to convince the judges—­not the entire audience, who are really as disconnected from the decision of the debate as are the straggling spectators and listeners in a courtroom detached from the jury who render the verdict of guilty or not guilty.  The debater must therefore speak for the judges, not for his audience.  Many a debating team has in the course of its speeches won all the applause only to be bitterly disappointed in the end by hearing the decision awarded to the other side.  Recall the warnings given in the previous chapters against the tempting fallacies of appealing to crowd feelings and prejudices.

In classroom debates it is a good distribution of responsibility to make all the members not participating in the speaking act as judges and cast votes in rendering a decision.  This makes the judges and the audience one.  Moreover it changes the mere listener into a discriminating judge.  If the instructor cares to carry this matter of responsibility one step farther, he can ask the members of the class to explain and justify their votes.

The audience, when it is also the judge, has the responsibility of careful attention, analysis, and comparison.  It is too much to expect usual general audiences to refuse to be moved by unworthy pleas and misrepresentations, to accord approval only to the best speakers and the soundest arguments.  But surely in a class of public speakers any such tricks and schemes should be received with stolid frigidity.  Nothing is so damaging to appeals to prejudice, spread-eagleism, and fustian bombast as an impassive reception.

The Judges.  In any debate the judges are of supreme importance.  They decide the merits of the speakers themselves.  The judges are of infinitely more importance than the audience.  In interscholastic debates men of some prominence are invited to act as judges.  In the instructions to them it should be made clear that they are not to decide which side of a proposition they themselves approve.  They are to decide which group of speakers does the best work.  They should try to be merely the impersonal registers of comparative merit.  They should sink their own feelings as every teacher must when he hears a good speech from one of his own students supporting something to which the instructor is opposed.  Good judges of debates realize this and frequently award decisions to speakers who support opposite positions to their personal opinions.  They must not be like the judges in an interscholastic debate who announced their decision thus, “The judges have decided that China must not be dismembered.”  That was an interesting fact perhaps, but it had nothing to do with their duty as judges of that debate.