Utter yourself against some meanness or
hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition,
and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a
hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime
has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their
forked tongues,--words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored,
Anglo-Saxon,--in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and
Shakespeare wrote.
But whatever be the source of this habit, it is on the increase. At
sixteen, boys swear with as much facility as the grandfather did at
sixty. Our streets are cursed by it from end to end. Our hotels, from
morning until midnight, resound with it. Men curse on the way to the
bar to get their morning dram; curse the news-boy who cries the paper;
curse the breakfast for being cold; curse at the bank, and curse at
the store; curse on the way to bed; curse at the stone against which
they strike their foot; and curse at the splinter that gets under the
nail.
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