He cannot get along
without that. Let him be clean of speech, therefore.
This growing prejudice against profanity is not unreasonable. Oaths
indicate a poverty of language--of ideas. The thief, the burglar, the
low-class criminal everywhere, expresses all his emotions by oaths.
Are they angry? They swear. Surprised? They swear. Delighted? They
swear. Every conception of the mind, every impulse of the blood, is
expressed in the narrow and base vocabulary of profanity. So that the
first thing an oath indicates is that he who uses it has limited
intellectual resources, otherwise he would not employ so commonplace a
method of expressing himself.
Then, too, we quite unconsciously connect the swearing man with the
class which habitually employs profanity as the staple of its talk;
and so he who uses an oath in our presence automatically sinks to a
little lower level in our esteem. We cannot help it. We do not reason
out the why and wherefore of it, but we know it is so.
Do not justify yourself by talking about Washington raging at
Monmouth, or Paul Jones boarding the _Serapis_, or Erskine climaxing
his greatest effort for justice with an appeal to the Father of the
universe.
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