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Looking at the road, as I have seen it, and have tried to describe it, running broad and white across the valley; at the soldiers moving along it; at the political officers extending their influence in all directions; at the bridge and fort of Chakdara; and at the growing cantonment on the Malakand Pass, it needs no education to appreciate its significance. Nor can any sophistry obscure it.

Had not your confiscators, by their early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder.

But, my lords, it is easy to disentangle all this perplexity of ideas, and to set truth free from the shackles of sophistry, by observing that it is, in all civilized nations of the world, one of the first principles of the constitution, that the publick has a right, always reserved, of having recourse to extraordinary methods of proceeding, when the happiness of the community appears not sufficiently secured by the known laws.

Is it not, indeed, a disparagement of the self-depending faculties of the American people thus to affirm that, in spite of their marvelous advantages, they would have failed in industrial life unless by force of law they could have prevented the competition with them of other peoples? It is only by the sophistry to which I have referred that this disparagement is justified.

"That is a question," I said, "that is a vital one in our present situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public. What would you say to this case? A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need of it. The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education.

When in a playful mood he chose to use the weapons of the sophist, the ablest men feared the ticklish game and fought shy, and where the line lay between truth and error it was impossible to find out; and he was equally skilful in unravelling the sophistry of others, dissecting it asunder with the keenest relish and with exquisite skill.

The secretary was out, but his stenographer confirmed the circular. Fred went back to his office to think things over. Again he was tempted to repudiate the Brauer check at the bank and let Brauer do his worst. But he drew back from such a course with his usual repugnance. He saw now that all his high-flown theory about standing on his own feet was the merest sophistry.

Mysticism, scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to its direct observation.

I had no tenantry to come forth to meet me, nor were American tenants much addicted to such practices, even when they were to be found: though the miserable sophistry on the subject of landlord and tenant, one of the most useful and humanizing relations of civilized life, did not then exist among us, that I am sorry to find is now getting into vogue.

In the third division of the lecture the Prince of Darkness showed his skill in manipulating the utterances of the speaker. By a second series of illustrated charts the lecturer intended to show how alcoholic beverages, in coursing through the human system, benefited the heart rather than injured it. In trying to establish this point he used the subtlest sophistry of Satan.