Ottumwa weekly courier. (Ottumwa, Wapello County, Iowa) 1872-1899, 1877-02-28
"lnaecencx of the Mouth,

1ue Dcs MONIES H6yiStcT VI tnt
2lst inst. has the following very jus
remarks in relation to the above
named subject. We commend them
to the good sense of every citizen, and
hope that il there are any who ever
do offend against decency in the
manner alluded to, that this may
work in them a reformation that
shall be worthy and lasting. The
Register says:
"The Congregational people of Des
Moines, have had 10 cut out and re-
move some fifteen or twenty yards of
the carpet in their fine new church,
where it was soiled by filthy tobacco
spitters the night that General Cary
lectured there. 1t would seem that
any one who had sense enough to
want to go and hear a temperance
lecture would also have had decency
enough not to spit tobacco slop upon
the floor and carpet. We call it to-
bacco slop, for if there is anything
that is slop it is the vile conglomera-
ton which men send from their
mouths under the name of tobacco
spit. It seems hard to talk so to peo-
pie who use tobacco,-but it is still
harder on such people that their filthy
habits of splitting out tobacco juice
wherever they happen to be, makes
such harsh talk necessary. Men who
are gentlemen in everything else
seem to forget their gentlemanliness
when their mouths are filled with the
spit-making weed. Such persons will
go into rcsider &c and spit upon the
floor, sometimes directly on the car
pet, and will do the same thing in an
Office, carpet or no carpet-and they
do the same in railway cars, making
the seats they have occupied uninhab-
liable to those who may come after
them-they do the same thing in OPP
era houses and public halls-and they
do the same thing toward making the
sidewalks filthy, as far as they can do
it. The evil seems to be a growing
one, and, as we have said, men who
are gentlemen in everything else, are
beginning to rival the old sinners in
the practice. Such persons have q
right to chew tobacco if they want to
-of course. But they have no right
to make themselves and their habit
cause of oGense to those to whom it
is distasteful, and general nuisance
to the public at large. 1t is squirt,
squirt, squirt with them all the time
and at all places, in doors and out
of doors, on carpets and on walls, out
of windows and across the room at
spittoons. If other people should, in
the presence of these same persons, 60
to ejecting food ont of their mouths,
or coffee, or anything else in liquid
shape, they would most vociferously
decry the habit as being filthy, and
talk piteously of their nauscation at
such a sight. But why not food in a
liquid or pulpy state as well as tobac-
co, in its ugly spit or in its uglier
quid,-cud, we think it ought to be
called. What can be of worse color,
or what can scatter or spatter worse
in scattering than tobacco spit? Will
not the tobacco users think of the
other stomachs that arc weak as we'll
as their own3 And will not think of
the carpets that they injure, the rail-
way cars that they make uninhabit-
able, the churches and opera houses
that they defile, and the sidewalks
they bespatter in manner only less
filthy than they can be made when
geese are free-commoncrs As VIC
have said, these are hard words to
use, and more's the pity for you tina,
such words can be used and used
%r0Iv