Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
How the debating-club prospered in the genial atmosphere of the settlement house; how from a little club it grew to be a big club, as the little boys became young men; how Joseph and Isaac and Harry and the rest won prizes in public debates; how they came to be a part of the multiple influence for good that issues from Garland Street all this is a piece of the history of Hale House, whose business in the slums is to mould the restless children on the street corners into noble men and women.
He is evidently not a good hater even of "priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;" or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating-club speeches and leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong; for there is no form of lovable or right thing which this man has come across, which he does not seem to have appreciated.
Old principles were dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider theories of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian rushed with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most reckless and noisy debating-club spouters of the day.
It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne."
Many a young man of his year whose hob-nailed shoes Pen had derided, and whose face or coat he had caricatured many a man whom he had treated with scorn in the lecture-room or crushed with his eloquence in the debating-club many of his own set who had not half his brains, but a little regularity and constancy of occupation, took high places in the honours or passed with decent credit.
The very government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. Our Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago.
The very government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys' debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. Our Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago.
"That is all very well as a debating-club answer," replied Turnbull good-humouredly, "but the question still remains: Why don't you confine yourself more to Christians if Christians are the only really good men?" "Who talked of such folly?" asked MacIan disdainfully. "Do you suppose that the Catholic Church ever held that Christians were the only good men?
Nevertheless, Sir Charles Lyell is fully a believer in the doctrine of the high antiquity of man. His book is not merely a debating-club discussion of the pros and cons, the probabilities for and against the doctrine, but rather the earnest pleading of the advocate fully persuaded that the truth is on his side.
I brought the debating-club into my story just to show how naturally the children of the slums drift toward their salvation, if only some island of safety lies in the course of their innocent activities. Not a child in the slums is born to be lost.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking