The Abominations of Modern Society

by T. De Witt Talmage

The most ungentlemanly thing a man can do is to swear. This habit is becoming more and more prevalent because of the immorality of parents and employers. There are very many fathers who indulge in this habit. They feel moved to utter themselves in this way, but first look around to see if their children are present. They have no idea that their children know anything about it. The probability is that if you swear, your children swear. They were in the next room and heard you, or somebody told them about your habit. Your child is practising to do just as you do. He is laughed at, at first, for his awkwardness, but after a while he will swear as well as you.

Then look at the example of master carpenters, masons, roofers, and hatters. You know how some of you go around the building, and, when the work of your journeyman and subordinates does not please you, what do you say? It is not praying, is it? Forthwith, your journeymen and subordinates learn the habit. Hence our hat-shops, and house-scaffoldings, and side-walks, and wharves, and dockyards, and cellars, and lofts ring with blasphemies.

Men argue that, if it is right for a man worth fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to swear, it can be overlooked in men who have merely their day's wages. Because they are poor must they be denied this one luxury?

This habit becomes more prevalent because of the infirmities of temper. There are many men who, when at peace, are most fastidious of speech, but when aroused into the violence of passion, blaze with imprecation. The Oriental's wife spoken of would not have liked her husband to be profane under ordinary circumstances, but now that the camels are gone, and the sheep are gone, and the property is gone, and the boils have come, she says: "Why don't you swear? Curse God and die!" Others, all the year round, have not the froth of profanity wiped from their lips, but try to expend all the fury of a twelvemonth in one red-hot paragraph of five minutes. A man apologized for his occasional swearing by saying that, once in a year, in this way he cleared himself out. There are men who have no control of their blasphemous utterances, who want us to send them to Congress. Others have blasphemed in senatorial places, pretending afterwards that it was a mere rhetorical flourish.

Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called by-words. I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often ends in bald profanity. It is, "I declare!" "My stars!" "Mercy on me!" "Good gracious!" "By George!" "By Jove!" and "By heavens!" and no harm is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of talk to that which is positively obnoxious. The English language is magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take to ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath. 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. If you do not know that this is so, it is because your ear has been hardened by the perpetual din of profanities that are enough to bring down upon any city the hurricane of fire that consumed Sodom.

The habit is creeping up into the higher circles. Every woman despises flat and unvarnished imprecations; but in the most elevated circles there are women who swear without knowing it. They have read Bulwer, and George Sand, and the exaggerated style of some of our imported as well as home-made periodical literature, until they do not actually know what is decency of speech. With fairy fan to their lips they utter their oaths, and, under chandeliers which discover not the faintest blush, recklessly speak the holiest of names. This is helped on by the second glass of wine, that is perfectly harmless; and though no one dare charge her, being so finely dressed, with anything like intoxication, yet there comes a glassiness to the eye, and a glow to the cheek, and a style of speech to the tongue that were not known before she took the second glass that was perfectly harmless.

One wild, terrific wave of blasphemy is sweeping over the land. See the effects of this widespread profanity in the increasing perjury. If men in ordinary conversation so commonly use the name of God, is it wonderful that in the jury-box, and in the alderman's office, and in the custom-house so many swear falsely? Notice the way an oath is administered. They toss the Bible at a man, and in the most trivial way say: "So help you God—kiss the book." I suppose enough lies are every day told in the custom-house to sink it. Smuggling, although it be done against positive oath, is in some circles considered a grand joke; and you say some day to your friend, "How can you sell those goods so cheaply?" and your friend says with an eye-twinkle, "The Custom-House tariff was not as high on those things as it might have been." Men more easily break their solemn oaths than formerly. What strange verdicts juries do sometimes render! What peculiar charges judges do sometimes make! What unaccountable slowness sheriffs and their deputies sometimes exhibit in the execution of their writs! What erratic railroad enterprises suddenly pass at our State capitals! What wonderful changes Congress makes in the tariff on liquors!

What is an oath? Anything solemn? Anything appealing to the Almighty? Anything stupendous in man's history? No! It is "kissing the book!" In a land where the name of God so often becomes the foot-ball of what are called respectable circles, how can we expect that it can excite any veneration when, in the presence of county clerk, or alderman, or judge, or legislative assembly, it is used in solemn adjuration? This habit lowers, bedwarfs, and destroys the entire moral nature. You might as well expect to raise harvests and vineyards on the side of belching Stromboli as to have any great excellency grow upon your soul when it so often overflows with the scoriæ of this awful propensity. You will never swear yourself up. You will swear yourself down. The Mohammedans, when they find a slip of paper they cannot read, put it aside, for fear the name of God is on it. That, you say, is one extreme. We go to the other.

You are willing to acknowledge this a miserable habit, and would like to have some recipe for its cure.