Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1900 — No Longer Good Form. [ARTICLE]

No Longer Good Form.

Gossip has 'g-one out It Is no longer considered good form to backbite. This, comments the New York Home Journal, is good news, and the best of It Is that there is really a modicum of truth In It. There Is a better social atmosphere in this respeqt than there was a decade ago. This'ls to some extent due to the preachers, but still more largely to the general growth of culture and to the interest in athletics. “People will talk,” and when they had nothing but their neighbors to talk About they soon exhausted the good things they could say about them and fell back on the bad. But society has a great many Interests now that are uot merely personal, and the conversationlevel has risen. Where Mrs. Grundy used to retail disagreeable rumors about Mr. and Mrs. Brown-Jones, she now talks about putts and tees and bunkers. Mrs. Grundy has traveled, too, and she is too full of travel-talk to gossip very much. She realizes, too, that there Is a cer|aln lack of dignity in making other people’s actions the subject of comment, and so she lets them severely alone. This is extremely encoufagihg, for if once evil speaking can become unfashionable, Mephistopheles will lose a winning card.