To indulge in argument is to convict oneself of immaturity. Only the colossal egotism of youth believes that there is but one point of view, his own, to which the rest of the world may be converted by eloquent reasoning. The fully-matured adult has learnt that every problem has as many facets as a diamond, and that a man’s angle of vision determines which facet shall to him seem the brightest. 

Knowing the complicated mixture of heredity, upbringing and experience which went to make up his own angle of vision, the wise man will courteously concede to his neighbour the viewpoint built from his materials, accepting reasonably its difference from his own. And really this is not rare wisdom, but the simplest of common-sense, for who has ever known a men to be convinced by argument? ‘Think for a moment of those subjects which most arouse passionate controversy - politics and religion. Are not the seeds of these beliefs laid so deep in each man's earliest consciousness that nothing can uproot then? The god a man serves is his nursery god; his attitude to the state is his attitude to life, so that the happy, self-satisfied child must inevitably be conservative, the nursery rebel a leader of lost causes, Can these tendencies be affected one iota by argument? Lip-agreement there may be to a skilful opponent; even head-agreement, if his case seem logically unassailable but heart~agreement -never! 

Since of any man it is as true to-day as in the days of Solomon that “as he thinketh in his heart, so is he, we that aspire to wisdom will save our breath, grasp our maturity , and quietly leave the lists of argument to the young, who will use them, as they must always be used, for the testing and confirming of their own, deep-rooted beliefs.