high as a thousand were caught in a single spring of the net, it is no wonder that the birds were soon entirely exterminated from America.

Frequently, too, unity is violated by making a paragraph of each sentence. In other words, the so-called paragraph does not perform the function of developing a principal idea at all; it merely states an idea. The reader gains a false notion of relations, because what he first takes to be units are, he sooner or later discovers, only fragments. Note the choppy, unorganized impression which the following sentences produce:

I was born on a four-hundred-acre farm ten miles south of Cleveland, January 16, 1891.

Until I was old enough to go to school, the only playmates I had were my two sisters and my brother, all of whom were much older than I.

When I started to school I had other playmates, but not many, for there were only sixteen pupils in the school. Ten of these were girls, and since I did not like to play with girls, I did not have many more companions than some boys have in their own homes.

So you see when I was a boy I had plenty of time to be by myself and think.

In truth, they constitute only one paragraph. If anyone doubts that they would produce a single impression if thus written, let him bring them into paragraph form and make the test.

If, now, we desire to see the difference between the imperfectly unified paragraph and the one which is well unified, we have only to contrast one of these foregoing examples with the one which follows. Although it is long, it contains only one thought; namely, that freedom of bargaining is essential to the best interests of the trades-unions.

Freedom of bargaining is not only thus essential to the community, and especially to the workingmen; it is also essential to the best interests of the trades-unions. The trades-union, to be permanently efficient, must be an organization of free men; it must be composed of members who believe in unionism and are loyal to it; it must be an industrial army of volunteers, not of drafted men; it must make its way in the labor world by persuading the laborers that it is for their interest to join it and be loyal to it, not by coercing them to join it by threats of violence on the one hand or of starva

tion on the other.

There is only one organization which in a free community men may be compelled to join whether they will or not - namely, the State. They are born into the State, are members of the State, must obey the laws enacted by the State, in time of danger must come to the defense of the State, must, if necessary, hazard their lives for the State. This is true of no other organism. If they are coerced into the church, as they were in the Middle Ages, the same process which deprives them of their freedom deprives the church of its spiritual vitality. If they are coerced into a labor organization, as some labor leaders would have them in this twentieth century, the same process which deprives them of their freedom deprives the labor organizations of that spirit of brotherhood which is at once the justification for its existence and the inspiration of its power. The right of labor to organize rests upon the right of the individual to labor. Whoever denies this right of the individual denies the foundation on which the right of organized labor rests.1

The test for paragraph unity is not an absolute test, because completeness is itself a relative matter. Any subject may be dealt with in a sentence, a paragraph, or a long series of paragraphs. If the writer desires to treat in detail the material which he has already expressed only in the large, he does not alter the organization of the more general treatment, but simply carries out a scheme of proportional amplification. Thus what was before only a sentence now becomes a paragraph; the central idea passes through a process of iteration, example, illustration, and perhaps summary. Nevertheless, a reasonably satisfactory test is possible; and it is to be found in this very process of thought development. We cannot, it is true, determine absolutely whether a paragraph is so well rounded that it is sure to mark a full step in the whole composition, but we can always ascertain whether it expresses more than one chief thought, and whether it contains incidental digressions. This test is made by trying to put the substance of the paragraph into one sentence, the sentence from which, in theory at least, it was originally developed.

From what has been said about this test it should not be understood that every paragraph contains a topic sentence. Some

1 Lyman Abbott, The Outlook, Vol. 77, p. 633.

times a sentence of this kind is quite unnecessary, and occasionally for example, in summary or transition paragraphs — it is wholly impossible. It is, to be sure, often advisable to begin the paragraph with such a sentence, inasmuch as the brief introductory statement of purpose always helps to make comprehension easy. Not infrequently it contributes to clearness to go further and repeat the substance of this first sentence at the end of the paragraph. But neither the former nor the latter is in every case essential. It is not the printed presence of the topic sentence that unity demands, but the living possibility of such a sentence.

C. UNITY APPLIED TO THE SENTENCE

The application of unity to the sentence is frequently a much more difficult problem than it first appears to be. We have observed that making a test for unity in the paragraph is more definite procedure than making a similar test in the whole composition. Hence it might seem that the application of the principle to the sentence would be a still simpler matter. But here in the smallest of the three units we encounter difficulty that arises solely from the fact that the unit is small. What is a sentence, anyhow? Doubtless we have been told innumerable times that it is a group of words expressing a complete thought. But what is a thought? When is a thought complete? When is it more than complete? When is it less than complete? We should find ourselves needlessly delayed if we should stop to answer all these questions in detail; but we can afford to consider for a moment the mental action that results in a thought, a sentence.

Every normal human mind is teeming with apparently unrelated ideas or concepts. Whenever two of these are related by mental processes, the result is what psychologists call a judgment. In the language of those of us who do not hold so strictly to technical phraseology, this result is a thought. A thought, then, is complete only when it expresses the relation

of at least two ideas. As a simple example, "students" and "write" standing apart cannot be regarded as expressing a thought; but they do express a thought when we bring together the ideas for which they stand, and say "Students write." In the language of grammar, we have a subject and a predicate. If, now, we bear this essential nature of a thought clearly in mind, we can always ascertain whether our sentences violate unity in one respect, — that of being less than complete. Thus it is easy to see that "A noticeable man with large gray eyes is not a sentence. It is scarcely more difficult to see the incompleteness of the longer fragment: "A long stretch of track, where the endless corn rows, straight and clean, seem to revolve slowly around the train." We can see also that the following example should be written not as two sentences but as one:

My roommate sits quietly down at his desk, picks up paper and pen, and writes his theme in two hours. While I spend two or three afternoons at the task.

Although the grammatical dependence of such clauses as the one beginning with "While " ought to be clearly evident, dismembered sentences of this kind are painfully numerous in the work of inexperienced writers. Here again we are without an absolute standard, yet if we make a test for the simplest kind of thought completeness, the dependence of the detached clause usually becomes clear.

The other common violation of sentence unity is overcompleteness. It is true, of course, that occasionally we find a sentence which violates the principle because of a digression in a subordinate clause, as in this example:

When the other four came in, Jack was admiring Claribel, who for two days had been thinking about a girl friend who could not come back to college because her grandmother had been injured in a railroad wreck.

But instances of this kind are so unusual that they need not detain us. The troublesome sentence is the one which does not introduce wholly unrelated matter, but instead brings to

gether coördinate thoughts that do not stand in manifest relation to each other; that is, the thoughts expressed in the coördinate clauses of the sentence are so unlike that they will not blend. The fault is obvious in the following example:

School, College, and Character is very interesting and is published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

While violations of this kind are not always so easily discerned as in this case, they are alike in their essence; they are the result of an attempt to make an impossible mental union. That the fault is not due to grammatical structure alone may be seen in a sentence built in precisely the same way, yet quite satisfactory in its unity:

School, College, and Character is as interesting as a novel and is more inspiring than most sermons.

II. COHERENCE

As we have seen, unity is a principle which has to do with the writer's ability to produce one impression at a time. Whether he is writing a whole composition or a paragraph, his purpose, the material he employs in carrying out his purpose, and the attitude he maintains toward his subject while he works must blend in this one impression. But if the distinct thoughts are to contribute to this impression, they must stand in unmistakable relation to one another. Now in making relations clear, it is necessary to bring to our aid the service of another cardinal principle of composition, coherence. Unity is a matter of assembling or blending ideas; coherence is a matter of using mechanical means to make the relation of these ideas perfectly clear. In other words, coherence makes unity visible by giving it a body. If the matters about which we write are a series of transactions, coherence guides us in arranging them in the simplest chronological order; if they are closely related solely because they are similar in significance, coherence will show this connection by making their order closely logical;