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Updated: June 7, 2025
Dick used to wax indignant, and none the less so because, as his father was a skilful disputant, he found himself not seldom in the wrong.
In a world more and more given to judging trees by their fruits, we should err if we dismissed this sentiment, this faith, too lightly. Flaubert may have been a better disputant; he had a talent for writing. George Sand may have chosen her side with a truer instinct; she had a genius for living. This faith of hers sustained well the shocks of many long years, and this sentiment made life sweet.
The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion?
Foremost of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from time immemorial, Facts!
And then another voice was interjected, another disputant stepped quickly forward, and Toomey checked himself in the first breath of an impassioned outburst; his black hand suddenly shot half-way up to the cap-visor, then came down with a jerk; his heels had clicked together and his knees straightened out, then as suddenly went limp. The new-comer had sprung up the steps.
Each disputant draws from a panic about the same amount of support for his views, because in the great variety of circumstances which surround it there are always some which favor any theory of its origin. In one thing, however, both sets of observers are apt to agree thoroughly, and that is in believing the "thing will not blow over," and that "we are going to feel it for a long time."
I am no skillful casuist nor subtle disputant; and yet I would undertake to justify and qualify the profession of a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly, as to make many ignorant people embrace the profession, as an innocent, if not even a laudable one; and puzzle people of some degree of knowledge, to answer me point by point.
I now find, but find too late, that, instead of a writer, whose only power is in his pen, I have irritated an important member of an important corporation; a man, who, as he tells us in his letters, puts horses to his chariot. It was allowed to the disputant of old to yield up the controversy, with little resistance, to the master of forty legions.
He next asked him how he knew it was the spirit of Toogoo Ahoo? His answer was, 'There's a fool! How can I tell you how I knew it! Finow's son was evidently made for a theological disputant, and fell back at once on the inexpugnable stronghold of faith when other evidence was lacking. "There's a fool!
"No, your majesty, France will wait to see what we propose to do until it is too late, and she will perceive that a resort to arms will in no wise affect a fait accompli. I, therefore, repeat that the only way to prevent the Polish conflagration from spreading to other nations is for us to preserve a strict neutrality, taking part with neither disputant."
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