Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, and added that he left his former home in New Jersey under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar Misfortune.” About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was spoken of by “the chivalry” as the young man “who had lately met with an accident.” Is it not an alarming sign of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked by another member for his vote, and told that he would get “five hundred reasons for giving it”; thus making the highest word in our language, that which signifies divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the synonym of bribery?
Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been more debased than “gentleman.” Originally the word meant a man born of a noble family, or gens, as the Romans called it; but as such persons were usually possessed of wealth and leisure, they were generally distinguished by greater refinement of manners than the working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the course of ages their riches and legal privileges diminished, and the gulf which separated them from the citizens of the trading towns was bridged by the increasing wealth and power of the latter, the term “gentleman” came at last to denote indiscriminately all persons who kept up the state and observed the social forms which had once characterized men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that the acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning. Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment assume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied to the vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants, as well as to the poorest and most illiterate persons in the community.
In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of society have so far disappeared that even the porter who lounges in his big chair, and condescends to show you out, is the “gentleman in the hall”; Jeames is the “gentleman in uniform”; while the valet is the “gentleman’s gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV, who was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in heart and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon the ground of his grand and suave manners, “the first gentleman of Europe.” But in the United States the term has been so emptied of its original meaning,—especially in some of the southern states, where society has hardly emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot each other in a street fray still babble of being “born gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”—that most persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and barbarian, the gentleman. Cowper declared, a hundred years ago, in regard to duelling:
“A gentleman
Will not insult me, and no other can.”
A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “gentleman” was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, and remarked that “it was the most quiet, peaceable place he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no fighting about the streets. If a gentleman insulted another, he was quietly shot down, and there was the last of it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders: “I asked the gentlemen if he desired to address the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, when he was surrounded in the barn, where he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his word “as a gentleman,” to come out and try to shoot one or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was asked by a hackman: “Are you the man that’s going to ride with me; for I am the gentleman that’s to drive?”
When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his “generosity,” his “big-heartedness,” and “contempt for trifles”; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms “economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! Many a man has blown out another’s brains in “an affair of honor,” who, if accused of murder, would have started back with horror. Many a person stakes his all on a public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he does not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “hell,” and as much a gambler as if he were staking his money on rouge-et-noir or roulette. Hundreds of officials have been tempted to defraud the government by the fact that the harshest term applied to the offence is the rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted without compunction the downfall of the government, and plundered its treasury, as “secessionists,” who would have expected to dangle at the rope’s end, or to be shot down like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”—“convey the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging themselves, Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression that they are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “connoisseurs in good living,” whose cheeks would tingle with indignation and shame if they were accused, in point-blank terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance or gluttony. “I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As You Like It,” “though I thank the gods I am foul.”
Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to juggle with words, none better than auctioneers understand how much significance lies in certain shades of expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auctioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he described a certain ancient gallows as a “hanging wood.” At another time, having made the beauties of the earthly paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault or two, lest it should prove “too good for human nature’s daily food,” the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and reluctantly added: “But candor compels me to add, gentlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid property,—the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”
It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is done to society by the debasement of its language in the various ways we have indicated. When the only words we have by which to designate the personifications of nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systematically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ultimately share in the debasement to which their proper names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! In reading the literature of former days, we are shocked occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our fathers; but even their coarsest terms,—the “naked words, stript from their shirts,”—in which they denounced libertinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy which has taught men to abuse each other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsomeness of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in the most modest terms.