Charles Arthur Willard. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. x + 384 pages. Bernard Crick. In Defence of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 156 pages. Jose Ortega y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W. W. Norton, 1932 [1930]. 204 pages. John Dewey. The Public and Its Problems. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1927. 224 pages.

As I enter my last year of my editorship of the Quarterly, a sense of sadness is setting in, both about my declining energies and about the ending of my love affair with the Quarterly. But all good things just cannot go on forever. It is a little late now to be expressing some of the following sentiments, but still they might prove useful to some readers. As a statement of farewell my sentiments hopefully may place in perspective what the Quarterly has been all about. These rather unscholarly sentiments have guided my nickle and dime makeshift efforts to put together the Quarterly year after year. It is probably best that I have kept some of these sentiments to myself up until now, much like Harry Truman's final negative sentiments about the Missouri Waltz. But, let me out with them, for they say much about the form and shape the Quarterly has taken over the years. As comments they will be valedictory rather than advice for rhetoricians to come. I do not want to impose upon my successors the burden of my errors. I don't think that I need tell many members of the Rhetoric Society that around some academic colleagues to fly the flag of is to invite not only scorn but contempt. With some it is to put professional careers at hostage and to place the direction of our research and scholarship in the hands of people who are making judgments where of they know not what they judge. If we wish to develop and expand programs under the label of rhetoric, it has, at least been my experience, to have to engage in endless explanations to colleagues about what it is we are doing in the name of rhetoric, why it is important, and above all that it is academically respectable. Certainly our claims need defending, but to have to continuously defend tries patience. By now we should, one would think, as skilled rhetoricians have convinced our opposition in academia of our eminent respectability. But we have not. I recall how on one occasion, when I was asked to justify the inclusion of philosophy, not rhetoric, in the general education program in my school, that I impatiently challenged that the burden of proof was on any one who wanted to eliminate it. Similarly, if the burden of proof were to be shifted to our opposition, I suggest, maybe they would have to take the time to know a little more about what they discount. But alas, to try to advance professionally under the flag of rhetoric, despite our convictions of its importance, is to go against the reversals of history, the Ramus decay, and the eventual complete collapse of as an academic discipline in the 19th century. It is most of all to have to struggle against the present day pejorative use of the term rhetoric. The common usage of the term rhetoric defines us. Rhetoric is merely mere. It is the common expletive for saying that what you say says nothing. Still, despite these simplistic dismissals of rhetoric, I fly my flag of knowing that my judgment about its overwhelming value to human history is correct. But the image of flags waving does, I admit, give me pause, for I have in my associative memory another image of a flag, a flag that cautions me about loyalty to any dead cause. It is the image of the Confederate flag. Has my loyalty to been very much different in kind from that of the South's nostalgic loyalty to that lost cause of all lost causes the Southern Confederacy?

Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Howard S. Becker with a chapter by Pamela Richards. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. pp. xii + 180. A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. John C. Hammerback, Richard J. Jensen and Jose Angel Gutierrez. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1985. Words and Values: Some Leading Words and Where They Lead Us. Peggy Rosenthal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; pp. i‐xii + 29S. Rhetorical Stances in Modern Literature: Allegories of Love and Death. Lynette Hunter. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.