Evening star., 1930-06-28
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRAcEwELL.

There have been apologies for idlers
procrastinators, and so on, but. as far
as we know, there have been few briefs
for the liar.
An apology for lying, therefore, is in
order.
Mostly mankind processes to find a
lie unforgivable. To call man a liar
is to invite punch in the jaw. Yet the
Joke Of the matter often is that the
epithet Is merited.
Almost every one-man, woman or
child-tells at least one falsehood every
day, sometimes more, as the occasion
demands.
1t is a fault or vice. or whatever one
chooses to call it, which is learned very
early in life, as every parent knows.
1t seems almost instructive with hu-
man beings to say mo" when, as a
matter of plain truth, they should say
Yes"
Such "lies" fall within the classifica-
tion Of protective devices, and as such
no doubt have played an important part
in the preservation of the human race
Let us not be too hard upon the SIM
pie liar, he who tells a tall one" in
order to avoid something unpleasant
One should withhold a lecture until
he is in possession of all the facts, and
then perhaps he will not deliver a lee
ture at all, since facts are hard to
acquire.
The truth about the lie seems to be
that mankind has gone of too strenu-
ously after the false maxim which
would inculcate the sterling belief that
big and little sins are all alike.
No doubt such ethics may be admi-
rable for the uprearing of the young
especially the very young. Perhaps a
child 3 years old may be induced to
believe that it is just as great sin to
steal pin as to acquire feloniously
toothSome tuber, more widely known as
a potato.
All of us over that age however, have
a very large suspicion that neither the
law nor the truth regards these matters
in exactly that light; that even the
most hardened judge would look leni-
emily upon the man brought into court
charged with the terrible theft of one
small pin.
1t is SO with the lie. There are big
lies, little lies, light lies, heavy lies,
lies which sting, lies which hurt, lies
which injure; there are lies which
trifle; there are lies which defame: there
are lies which doom man to whatever
hells may eXist-and one may feel
equally sure that some lies, told out of
light of love and glory and entitled
their tellers to a deserved place in
Paradise.
The world of man has found it neces-
sary, or at least has believed it has
found it necessary, to profess an equal
hatred of all lies and to visit an equal
condemnation on all liars, so great has
been the injury done by the telling of
certain types of lies. In this matter
mankind has seen no other way to pre-
vent what it does not like than to frown
upon that which it would otherwise ex-
cuse easily enough
The fact is that the world of men
has two ways of looking at life-from
the mass viewpoint and from the indi-
vidual viewpoint. The former is an
assemblage of traditions, based largely
upon emotions, which in their turn are
solidly based upon the old taboos of the
race. These run into antiquity Not
even the students of such things can
tell positively how certain ideas of the
human race came into being. The
origin OF beliefs is shrouded in the mist
of years, but of which few things stand
out clearly, charp-cut enough so that
the individual of today may say to