We may please and help and comfort the very same persons whom we may by different treatment irritate, bringing out the worst where we might with tact bring out the best that is in them. You take a piece of ribbon-grass and rub it from end to end and admire its velvet smoothness; but as you then rub it the other way you find it is pricking you as if malignantly. And one of the mysteries of electricity is that the same magnet with which you can attract by presenting one pole will repel if you present the other. (Text.)
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TACT, LACK OF
The natural effect of a lack of tact is seen in the man described below, who used the means to offend the very person who was to decide his fate.
Under no circumstances can a missionary, worthy of the name, be ever induced to say anything that would wound the susceptibilities or grieve the heart of one of his heathen or Mohammedan auditors. That is not necessary. They tell the story of a judge in Aleppo. He had but one eye. A person was condemned to prison, as he thought, unjustly. He rose before the judge and said: “Oh, one-eyed judge, I am imprisoned here on a false accusation; and I tell you, oh, one-eyed judge, that this man who has testified against me has received a bribe; and oh, one-eyed judge, if I do not get justice, I will report this case to the pasha; and if the pasha do not do justice, oh, one-eyed judge, I will report it to the sultan himself.” The judge rose from his seat in a rage and said: “Take the man back to prison. I won’t hear him plead before me and call me forever a one-eyed judge.”—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”
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It is a good story which Chauncey M. Depew tells of a dinner that the late King Edward as Prince of Wales once gave in honor of James G. Blaine, on one of his visits to England before he had even been a candidate for the Presidency. The one disagreeable man at the dinner was a duke of the royal house, who had a reputation for lack of tact. During a lull in conversation he blurted out: “The greatest outrage in history was the revolt of your people against King George III. There was no justification for it then, and there is no excuse for it now.” The prince, according to Dr. Depew, was plainly embarrassed. The one man who had the tactfulness to carry off the situation was Mr. Blaine who, in a carefully-modulated voice replied: “Perhaps if George III had possest as much diplomacy as his great-grandson, America might still be English.” The Prince of Wales, after the subject was passed, gript Blaine’s hands with a twinkle of admiration.—Boston Transcript.
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