Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the national deterioration, by perversions of the customary meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed as “manliness” and _esprit de corps_, and prudent caution for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. “Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “contributions”; the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a disburdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in perfecting this “devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.
The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.
Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, and added that he left his former home in New Jersey under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar Misfortune.” About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was spoken of by “the chivalry” as the young man “who had lately _met with an accident_.” Is it not an alarming sign of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked by another member for his vote, and told that he would get “five hundred _reasons_ for giving it”; thus making the highest word in our language, that which signifies divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the synonym of bribery?