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Gardiner, J. H.

"The Making of Arguments"

Since, then,
homicides have steadily increased during the past hundred years
under a law with severe penalties prohibiting them, a prohibitory
law has not been and cannot be a remedy for homicide.
31. Criticize the reasoning in the following extract from an argument
for the electrification of the terminal part of a railroad:
It is true that locomotive smoke and gas do not kill people
outright; but that their influence though not immediately measurable
is to shorten life cannot, I submit, be successfully combated.... A
few years ago I made some calculations based on the records of ten
years' operation of the railroads in this state, and found that if a
man should spend his whole time day and night riding in railroad
trains at an average rate of thirty miles an hour, and if he had
average good luck, he would not be killed by accident, without his
fault, oftener than once in fifteen hundred years, and that he would
not receive any injury of sufficient importance to be reported
oftener than once in five hundred years. I ask you to estimate how
long a man would, in your opinion, live if he were obliged
continuously day and night to breathe the air of our stations
without any opportunity to relieve his lungs by a breath of purer
and better air.


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