Nuhou, Volume II, Number 7, 5 August 1873 — Our Worst Disease [ARTICLE]

Our Worst Disease

Is not leprosy, but slander; we have got it bad, and the worst of it is, it attacks some of our nicest people. It is here as elsewhere, a disease peculiar to "good" people. An angel in whose virtuous mouth butter would not melt, will break out in a frightful rash of slander. The heart in such cases, through neglect, diasppointment and want of genial sympathetic exercise, becoming scabby, and the virus being freely eructed by the patient, is usually thrown into the faces of friends, and sometimes strangers, who would like to get out of the way if they could. Slander is usually virulent in a little community of parvenues, who have got an itch for aristocratic exclusiveness and who dread the approach or intrusion of any new aspirant to consideration, who may dim the gloss of their pretensions. And that's the case here; and some of our nice people have got this disease so bad, they don't know it. They actually utter slander sometimes in their orison God. It is a savage disease, and we will treat it savagely. It will agonise the heart of a father or mother, or brother, or sister, or wife, or lover, or friend, and have no mercy. And we will have no mercy. We want to make it dangerous to talk of things you don't know; and even if you do know that you ought, if you are a Christian, or a civilized human, to keep to yourself. The cure for a man whose tongue forever slobbers with the disease of slander, should be the lash or the halter. And for the woman whose tongue knows no peace, and would harry her sister to the grave with the venom of lies, is she could, - for such a one we would propose (and here we must express our deep regret to speak harshly against any portion of the sex whom we so much revere,) that she should be placed in a public pillory, with her tongue inserted into the cleft of a split stick, as we have seen tattling children treated at an old country school, and so standing or a time, with hands pinioned behind her back, be completed in all her army of fashionable costume, and terior nicety and propriety, as the hateful exemplar of slander. But alas! we hate no suitable structure on a platform in town big enough to hold all such cases, and must be content with the Nuhou pillory for the present.