BY VOTE OF THE HOUSE

The resolution of the Eastern Intercollegiate Debate League which leaves to a vote of the audience decisions in all League debates marks an improvement in the mechanics of this exercise. Not only will the audience cast its vote at the conclusion of the debate, but it will ballot on the question before the discussion starts. A decided shift in opinion in the second vote from the first will indicate a new conviction on the part of the audience, a conviction established by the arguments of one debating team.

The purpose of argument is after all to convince. School and college debates are prone to regard their exercise as an esoteric thing, entirely divorced from human conversation and understanding. This attitude leads to marshaling of facts and fancy, into an array which is presented in a fashion calculated only to get it all out on time. The new necessity to convince a body of intelligent fellow-beings whose sentiments have been sound already will lead inevitably toward a more careful preparation of briefs with special at tention to those qualities which make argument at once convincing and good to hear.

The logical conclusion indicated by this initiation of the audience into the inner circle is that the intercollegiate debate will become a forum. With the decision resting in its own hands, the audience will not be content silently to sit back and let its opinions be tossed about a half dozen young men in tuxedos. It will demand and assume a voice in the argument. This contingency will heighten the competition between the two teams by swelling the ranks of the opposition. If something of the intercollegiate flavor is lost by thus admitting the commoner, the gain is a notable one, along the road leading to the conception of debate as an exercise followed not entirely for its own sake, nor solely as a means to clarification of ideas, but for its forceful powers of conviction--the only purpose of any polemic.