Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1908 — The Crimes of the Tongue. [ARTICLE]

The Crimes of the Tongue.

The second most deadly instrument of destruction iB the dynamite gun—the first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills bodies; the tongue kills reputations, and oftentimes ruins characters. Each gun works alone; each loaded tongue has a hundred accomplices. The havoc of the gun is visible at once The full evil of the tongue even the eye of Omniscience might grow tired in tracing to its finality. The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying and scandal. Theft, and murder are awful crimes, yet In ia single year the aggregate sorrow, pain, and suffering they cause in.a nation is microscopic when compared with the sorrow that comes from the crimes of the topgue. Place in one of the scalepans of justice the evils resulting from the acts of criminals, and in the other the grief and tears &nd suffering resulting from the., crimes of respectibility, and you will start back in amazement as you see .the scale yot thought the heavier shoot high in the air. . ~a '. i At the hands of thief or murderer few of us suffer, even indirectly. But from the careless tongue of friend, the cruel tonghe of enemy, who is free? No human being can live a life so true, so fair, bo pure, as to be beyond the reach of malice or immune from the poisonous emanations of envy. The insidious attacks again* one’s reputation, the loathsome innuendos, slurs, half, lies, by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin its superiors are like those, insect parasites that kill the heart and 11 fp of a. mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, s 6 stealthy the shooting of the poisoned tKornif so insignificant the -separate acts in their seeming, &at one is not on guard against theth. It is easier to dodge an elephant than a microbe.William George Jordon, in “The Kingship of Self-Control.”