It is no good hearing the arguments of an opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious search for weaknesses.
This is proved, I fear, in every debate; when you hear each speaker arguing out his own prepared _specialite_ (he never intended speaking, of course, until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own _coached-up_ subject without the least attention to what has gone before, as utterly at sea about the drift of his adversary's speech as Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste, and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a few flippant criticisms.

Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard! How many new difficulties take form before your eyes?
how many superannuated arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced eclecticism! Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies.

They tend also to foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men.

This last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement of our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we devote a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a _clique_.

Friends propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society degenerates into a sort of family party.