Chapter VIII: The Brief

Suppose you have decided to debate one phase of the child labor problem, and your question reads something like this: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen years should be allowed to work in factories.” You see the question omits all discussion of child labor on the farm, for instance, or in the street trades, or in any occupation except those within doors under factory conditions. You will see, also, that before you begin your actual analysis, you and your opponents must agree on what you mean by “factories”—just what kind of manufacturing establishments you have in mind. Otherwise you would be compelled to define them more carefully in the question itself as you stated it.

For two reasons, you need the “brief” at this stage of your analysis. To discuss the least important one first—you should inform your critical friend or teacher as to just what your argument is. You must tell him what are the bones of the skeleton, indicate their arrangement, and show them to him without the beautiful covering of flesh and skin to be given them by your charming diction and eloquence. The bones may not be properly articulated at all—what, when clothed with the flesh and muscle of your finished debate, may seem like a strong right arm adequately equipped with biceps and all the rest of the blow delivering agencies may not be properly joined at the shoulder and hence fail utterly, when the test comes. So let your friendly critic—your specialist in this kind of anatomy—see just what you have and how your various arguments hang together.

But more important than to satisfy your critic is it carefully to formulate your argument for your own benefit in thinking through your proposition. As you think about your question, various considerations will suggest themselves to you. Some you will recognize as arguments of first rank—as indispensable to your case. Others will take a subordinate place; still others serve as mere illustrations or arguments from resemblance. Finally, however, your logical sequence will emerge, and you will have a structure which will be logical throughout, with every part fitting into every other part and pointing to an irresistible conclusion.

The name given to it well defines this formulation of your argument. It is your argument but in _brief_. Every essential to your full argument must be there. But take other warning from that name. In form don’t let it be too brief. It is not enough to sprinkle hints over the page, hints which may be fairly intelligible to you but be meaningless to another. Remember that critic of yours who will look over your brief. Don’t make it superficial or arrange your arguments in CASUAL instead of CAUSAL sequence. Besides, you may find in practice that a word which to-day, as you put it down on paper, hot from your thinking machine, means everything to you and is the key word to a weighty argument, to-morrow or next week will have lost its cunning and mean anything or nothing to you.

So not only for the benefit of your critic but especially for the value of the exercise to yourself, reduce your argument to definite formal organization. You will be paid in the long run. You may have such a command of yourself and your thinking that you can carry all this organization in your head without any brief—but most of us can’t. Moreover, you will find that putting these arguments down in black and white before you and then arranging them in causal logical sequence will aid your thinking immensely. Thoughts which were dim and misty, which were without form and substance, will fall into order and assume a relation to the whole subject unseen before.

You will also find that by a simple system of symbols you will aid this clarifying process. Propositions of equal dignity and rank will be introduced by equivalent symbols and thus their relationship automatically indicated. No, of course not—it is not _necessary_ to go through this process. You may get through many debates without using any of these aids—mechanical, if you please. But they are useful and have been used by hundreds of debaters. Don’t you think it is a little foolish to insist on swimming the river and demonstrating your power in that way, when there is available a very comfortable bridge that hundreds have used to their great convenience?

One other observation about the form of this “brief.” It should be so arranged that, using the words “for” or “because” to introduce your arguments, you will have a complete clause, with subject and predicate. You will note that clauses occur in the brief given below. I have connected them with their proper prepositions.

Subdivision I gives us: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor is unnecessary, for there is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to the demands of factory work.”

II. 1. A. gives us this sentence: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor injures the child’s health, for confinement within the building, under the conditions of factory employment, checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.” So II. 1. B. gives a second sentence like the one last quoted except that its last portion differs as the subordinate argument differs. That reads: “Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in factories, for such labor injures the child’s health, for normal physical development demands out-of-doors activity and freedom from the strain of factory work.”

Let me hint, too, that frequently after you have arranged what seems to be a perfect logical argument, if from under each head you remove the proof and connect the various sequences so that you form one sentence, you will find that it is not logical and must be arranged all over again.

Speaking of proof—in your proof under each subdivision you must set down the facts you expect to use to support your contentions. For example, under II. 2. A. b. it would not be sufficient to say in your brief “instances” or “illustrations” but:

“The report of Massachusetts Board of Education says: ‘The fact
that 41.3 per cent. of those employed in the textile industry
[speaking of a group out of school six years] receive less than
$8 a week accounts, in large part, for the idleness among boys
from eighteen to twenty-one years of age. There is no system of
training in the mill which fits those on low paid, unskilled
work, for the skilled work of the mill. Only 21 per cent. of
the textile workers who have been in the business six years
earn $10 or more, and a negligible percentage of those who work
in candy factories earn this amount. Only 21 per cent. of the
shoe workers earn less than $10 a week at six years out....
Monotonous work, especially that which requires great speed and
uses up nervous energy, should not be done for any long period
by young people under eighteen years of age, and the years up
to this time should be spent in physical and mental upbuilding
in preparation for the years of industrial life to come.’”

“A recent investigation of the Federal Bureau of Labor declares
of a certain number of children under sixteen years who left
school to work, that 90 per cent. entered industries in which
the wages of adults were $10 a week or less. A vocational
survey in New York exhibits in one group one hundred and one
boys between fourteen and sixteen years and an analysis of
the work they are doing. In only five cases was there any
opportunity for them to advance or improve; ninety-six were in
dead end occupations.”

“One woman, in Georgia, thirty-four years of age, but looking
fifty, told me she had gone to the mill when she was nine
years of age, and had been there ever since. She hated the
very thought of working in the mill and from all appearances
was ready for the scrap heap. She said when she was nine years
old nothing could have kept her out of the mill and for two or
three years after that she said she always listened for the
whistle to blow so that she could go to work and it never blew
too early for her. She said she wished she could get now where
she could never hear the whistle blow. She makes about ninety
cents per day when she works.”

“The boys [in Beverly, Massachusetts, where vocational
education is provided] come from the common schools. Reports
show that they are sons of clerks, shopkeepers, shoemakers,
tailors, chauffeurs, laborers, machinists and other workmen.
A boy’s earning capacity in Beverly is liberally estimated at
$6 a week, which capitalized on a 5 per cent. a year basis
represents a working capital value of $6,000 a year. The wage
earning capacity of boys, after two and a half or three years
of this public schooling, is $15 to $18 a week. Capitalized on
a 5 per cent. basis, this shows the marvelous increase from
$6,000 to $15,000 to $18,000 a year working capital.

“But the boy here is only on the threshold. Another set of
figures is interesting. Professor James M. Dodge, president of
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in his notable
and elaborate formula, finds that the average untrained worker
in this country reaches his maximum of earning at twenty-three
years of age, the average then being $15 a week. The future
of the untrained beyond this becomes precarious. They are in
‘blind alleys’ and ‘no-thoroughfare’ work. Only 5 per cent.
rise above the level, 35 per cent. remain in employ, 20 per
cent. leave the work of their own accord, and 40 per cent. are
dismissed. Here at seventeen and a half years or eighteen,
the vocationally educated pupil of the Beverly school has a
capitalized value of $15,000 to $18,000.”

I will now illustrate what I have said by briefing the question before us. Such a brief would read something like this:

Resolved: that no children below the age of sixteen should be
allowed to work in factories.

I. It is unnecessary, for

There is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to
the demands of factory work.

II. Such labor injures the child, for

1. It is injurious to his health, for

A. Confinement within the building, under the conditions of
factory employment, checks the growth of the child and promotes
many diseases.

B. Normal physical development demands out-of-doors activity
and freedom from the strain of factory work.

2. It is injurious to his mind and education, for

A. The child needs the years just before sixteen for

a. general culture

b. specific vocational training.

B. The monotony and excessive strain of work in factories
tends to

a. impair the mental powers, particularly those of young
children

b. render them indifferent to subjects of general interest
and educational value.

3. It impairs the efficiency of the child, for

A. During the years when he should be absorbing knowledge which
would prepare him for life, he is prevented from doing so, and,
when of adult age, finds himself

a. without that suppleness of fingers which has been assumed
to be the warrant for employing him, and thus, too old and too
large longer to do child’s work; and

b. with neither education nor training to do the work of an
adult.

III. Such labor injures the State, for

1. Children who are forced to work under factory conditions are
undeveloped physically and mentally and

A. Do not make good citizens

B. Cannot afterward be the parents of good citizens

C. Are prematurely aged, and “scrapped” at an early age, thus
imposing a burden of support upon the State.

2. Adult laborers, with their dependents, whose welfare is
necessary to that of the State, suffer hardship, because

A. The use of child labor, obviously a substitute for adult
labor, will

a. deprive adults of work, or

b. force their wages down to those of children.

3. It creates an idle class, which is always a menace to the
State, because it

A. Throws the child out of employment because of inefficiency
when he becomes an adult.

B. Throws the adult out of employment because of the
competition of child labor.

Is the ground covered? Is it logical? Is any step taken for granted?

Remember each position must be supported by proof, and your brief must set out the evidence you expect to use in your argument. The nature of that proof may vary, however. For example, suppose you were proving proposition II. 1. A., which properly set out at length would read: “No child below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in a factory, for such labor injures the child’s health because confinement within the building under the conditions of factory employment checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.”

That proposition might be proved in a number of ways. (Remember now what we discussed in the chapter on evidence and read that chapter over again in connection with this discussion.) You could prove it first by the testimony of those who are familiar with children so employed; second, by statistics of mortality and morbidity among children so employed; third, by testimony of experts—like physicians—as to probable results of such employment because of probable effect of conditions named upon bodily organs and their functions.

Here are some specific facts testified to in a legislative hearing on the question of child labor in mills—factories. They are all admissible as testimony from the first class of witnesses (those familiar with children so employed) under the principles laid down in the chapter on evidence.

A French boy of fifteen was asked if he preferred ten hours to
eight hours. “Oh no, ten hours is too long; it seems as though
I never would see the afternoon go by.” The mill work showed
its effect upon his pale, drawn face. He was tired out by it.

A pretty little French girl, fourteen years old, who had worked
in the mill a few months at two or three dollars a week, had
good reasons for her dislike of mill work. Getting up at 5.30
for a ten-hour day, standing nearly all the time, watching the
threads so closely that her head ached, she was frequently
sick. She had been replaced by an adult on September first,
and since that time had been at home doing housework. Her
health had improved greatly in the ten weeks, and when the
investigators saw her, she had good color and got chance enough
to play so that she was, as her mother said, much better off
than in the mill.

A heavy-eyed, dull looking boy of fifteen was sent back to
school as a result of the new law. He preferred to work, but he
had not succeeded in securing an eight-hour job. He happened to
live near the place in which the investigator stayed and there
was good opportunity to watch the effect of the law on him from
week to week. At the end of a month he had become noticeably
lively and bright.

Robert Hunter tells us of a vagrant he once knew who “had
for years—from the day he was eleven until the day he was
sixteen—made two movements of his hands each second, or
23,760,000 mechanical movements each year, and was at the time
I knew him,” says Hunter, “at the age of thirty-five, broken
down, drunken and diseased, but he still remembered this
period of slavery sufficiently well to tell me that he had
‘paid up’ for all the sins he had ever committed ‘by those five
years in hell.’”

“As State Factory Inspector of Alabama, my attention has been
called very forcibly to the child labor conditions in that
State, and, as a vast majority of the child laborers are in
the cotton mills and textile manufactories, I will confine my
remarks to the cotton mill children.

“The health of the mill operatives is what one would expect. It
varies in different mills. In certain localities the hookworm
is pictured on the faces of nearly all the children. Red blood
is conspicuous by its absence. The trained eye of the inspector
is often unable to tell whether the age of a weazened,
dried-up, anæmic specimen of the _genus homo_ is twelve or
eighteen.”

You can see how then each proposition of your argument must be supported by adequate evidence. I don’t intend to carry the illustrations further.

The amount of evidence you produce will be governed largely by where the burden of proof lies. That is rather a mysterious expression and often debaters spend a great deal of energy in trying to shift or dodge something they are not quite sure about, but they are sure it is something awful. It is really a very simple thing—its meaning is only that he who asserts must prove. If I say a certain thing is so, I must prove it. I cannot expect or ask you to prove that it is not so. Do you see the point? If you say it is 444 miles from Pecatonica to Readville, you must prove it is just 444 miles. You must bring up a surveyor or a table of distances of recognized authority or show in some authoritative way that you are correct. If you have made the definite statement you must prove it in a way equally definite—it’s no concern of mine to show that it is 445 miles or only five miles.

You will notice that this brief contains two classes of arguments—one which seems to anticipate possible contentions of the other side and the other which brings forward positive and direct contentions. The first class can best be catalogued as rebuttal and refutation and will be considered in the next chapter.

Some arguments, however, although of the nature of refutation of possible positions of your opponents may often be well introduced in the beginning of your main argument. For example, Proposition I: “Child labor is unnecessary for there is an ample supply of adult labor entirely adequate to the demands of factory work” is practically an answer to a possible argument of your opponent that child labor is necessary because some mills could not run without it. Suppose he had prepared himself with an elaborate argument to prove his position and you had knowingly or unknowingly anticipated his effort and established the opposite, he would find himself in a very awkward position. He would talk to an audience—or judge—already convinced by your arguments, or he would be compelled at least to destroy the force of your arguments before he could hope to implant his own in their place.

I only refer to this class of argument to show how your brief will contain the full body of your argument so that you will have all your tools ready and sharpened for your use. When you actually get to work, you may not use all of them after all. But if you find your opponent presents a tough, knotty problem for you to saw, your implement is ready. If it is only a pine lath of course a very different tool may be ample. But you will be ready and as you grow experienced in debate your facility will be shown in the ease with which you select now this, now that tool, or discard both of them.