The Opelousas courier., 1904-08-20

suggested tnat mans nOnOr
l. y is a myth. And appearances
~ seem to favor the sugges-
ton. But it may be that here again
appearances are misleading, because
so much more appears now than of
old. Few escape from those amateur
public prosecutors, not of the press
but of our acquaintance, who come
into our house under various p~reteXts,
them, and, in turn, sap our credit by
a system Of petty criticism of every
act and word, from which the Lord
Himself would not have escaped un-
scathed. They. find what they seek
In human nature, these people, nothing
but blemishes. There are undesirable
%accretions on most characters t9FsC can
be sloughed at wr ii the charaoe
ter as it should be; but it is the
sloughed accretions which the scaven-
ger critic rakes out of the dust heaps
of our dead selves, to which they be-
long, and would fain readjust to prove
his point. Certainly honor is not very
conspicuous at the present time in the
habits ofemen, whatever it may still
be in their estimation. Some say that
1t never was at so low an ebb: but that
can only be said in Ignorance. Take
the Creevy papers, for instance, to go
no further back. From the prince in
power to the struggling party polite
ian, what a picture we have there Of
sordid self-seeking, Of motives so mean
that a man must have extinguishd in
himself the most rudimentary sense
of honor before he could have acted
upon them.
Still, the fact that the existence of
honor in man has come. to be called in
question contains a threat which is sig
nificant. Our national honor has been
little vaunted of late. Our commercial
honor is a sore subject. Our profess
sional honor stands highest, but even
1t has been assailed. And as to honor
in politics, no one expects it of us.
Lately a politician in high repute, an
ex-member Of many governments, the
hero of many a hard won debate, was
describing to me some e~lectioneering
antics In which he had been engaged,
and In the enjoyment of his subject he
burst out with the assurance that Of
course he had lied; he had to lie, or he
never would have carried his point.
1t is not mans honor but his dishonor
that calls for comment every day.
The early life Of a oma Of my
time, cast out into the world, as was
the custom, without preparation, her
faith in man full 1edged, and no sus-
picion in her soul, was apt 30 be dark
ened by disillusion. ] kpow not how
It may affect a boy, but the first shock
Of proof that a man can lie is a thing
from which a girl never recoyers-I
mean q girl who has been brought up
In the tradition Of honor. There are
still some such. In the case Of the
boy, 1t may be that the system of edu-
cation at our public schools, by which
q hatred of learning is implanted for
life in the breasts of the majority of
the pupils, may be subtly calculated
to destroy oil i~nconvenient sensitive
ness on the subject of honor, as a
practical means Of fitting boys for sue
cess in any career by robbing them
at the outset Of an old-fashioned in
cumbranee. To hear men talk is to
think so sometimes. Levity is the pose
Of the Would-be wit Of to-day, and the
tone or the subject of honor tends to
sink low enough to be tainted by lev
ity. In modern fiction heroes and he
roines are often made to lie as a mat
ter Of course. and the reader is not ex-
pected to think any the worse of them.
In the days of Dickens the badge Of
honor was the unsullied word Of hero
and heroine. Even in conversation
men may be heard nowadays taking
credit to themselves for having lied
successfully o. occasion, a thing that
would not have been tolerated in gen
eral society barely a century ago.
Doubtless in those days there were
enough who dishonored their
word, but when they did SO they held
it a lapse. not an eyidenc Of smartness,
and kept the matter to themselves.
There was still In them at that time
the saving grace Of shame. An evi-
dence of the change of tone in this re-
spect came to me first from a man of
mark in his own time, a Roman Catho-
lie convert, ardent In his devotional
exercises, devouring to the full, with
keen aesthetic fervor, the emotional
possibilities Of his religion. We were
discussing o point Of honor, and he
argued hotly that q man is not dishon-
ored by a lie so long as he does not
bear false witness.
When q word falls into disuse, the
quality Of which it is the symbol is
apt to atrophy. In England the word
honor is becoming antfquated, il not
obsolete. No one now is expected to
talk of his honor, and the subject In
the abstract is only tolerated in the
utterances OF preachers in their
pulpits, orators on their platforms. or
editor in a leading article. The |
who should venture to discuss |
honor In a fashionable drawing-room
would be uuenched with the
silence which signifies that he had
a solecism.
The ebb of honor corresponds to the
rise OF the parvenu in our midst, and
the spread Of the commercial spirit
among the decadent nobility, whose
sense OF honor Is notoriously anaemic,
BY the commercial spirit I mean the
spirit which never gives. bur ALWAYS