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Show Tiie Menace of the Scandalmonger W The man who "imagines" things, like the K child in its dreams, with houses tumbling down H around and over it, Htruggling in rivers of muddy H water, falling from great heights, and other H thrilling experiences, and who goes out and tells p his day dreames to his friends as actual facts, is a B dangerous citizen, for he works in the dark and H his poison has been planted before the object of Ht his venom i aware of his presence. ' n He is on a par with the woman who "gos- v sips" with her neighbor. The character of many Bv a woman and man has been besmirched, many a ' 'serious difficulty, followed by wrecked homes, : crimes, court prosecutions and jail sentences have l been the result of the falshoods of the scandle- H; monger, who tells as a fact something baBed whol- I ly on rumor, and as to the truth of which he or H .she has no knowledge. This subject was very I' ' HI Hi1 aptly treated in a recent issue of the Pictorial Review, which says: "They say." "Have you heard?" Two wee phrases I Five short words 1 But they have done more damago than all the rest of the dictionary rolled togetherl They have wrecked homes and broken hearts.. They have ruined promising careers and thrown buisness firms into bankruptcy. They have disrupted churches and plunged old friends into bitter legal fights. The have driven men to drink and women to insanity. They have robbed innocent children of their parents and sent young girls, broken-hearted and unwed-ded unwed-ded to their graves. They have turned merely foolish girls into wicked ones and they have sent innocent men to prison. And they belong be-long particularly to the vocabulary of women. They are peculiarly the weapons of the so-called so-called gentler sex. "Marshal Briggs arrested Jim Jones for beating his wife," remarks a man to the circle of lounger in the post office. And it is so. Jim Jones is tried and lined in open court. This is not gossip. It is a plain, brutal statement of fact. "Have you heard that Mrs. Blank has left her husband?" inquires Mrs. Meddlesome at the sewing circle. "They do say he treats her something awful. Last night coming home from prayer meeting my Mary heard her carrying on fearfully, and this morning I saw her, bag in hand, hurrying for the 7:40 train. They say she's gone back to her folks." And so Tom Blank, silent, perhaps even surly, but adored by his understanding wife, acquires a reputation for cruelty, when in reality Mrs. Blank" was "carrying on" over a telegram announcing the death of a favorite sister. In her grief, she had forgotten to announce to her curious neighbors that she was going home to the funeral ! Had the meddlesome and imaginative mother of Mary the eavesdropper, been pinned pin-ned down to to facts, she must have admitted that no one had. really heard of Mrs. Blank's leaving her husband, and that no one had said that Ire treated his wife illy. The entire story was built on the imagination and sensational tastes of a gossip-monger. Innocent, Inno-cent, if surly, Mr. Blank wonders why his neighbors look at him so coldly in his hour of loneliness. When Mrs. Blank returns, she must -dd'to-tho-burdetvofher grief rhat odenying. an ugly story about her home ''life. All this doss no mean that men are devoid of c'uriousity or malice, only that they have a more direct and a safer way of justifying justify-ing both. They go after facts. Men do gossip, gos-sip, but they repeat what they. know. Women take a chance on repeating the little they havG seen, plus the much they have heard, and color- the result with a thick application of imagination. Men rarely use the phrase, "They say." Rather it is, "Brown told me." And then Brown is held responsible for the rumor or the statement. Men may be curious about the doings. of their neighbors or what goes on in the offices and stores of his competitors com-petitors but they also have a wholesome respect re-spect for scandel and libel laws, and a simple and practical way of demanding facts concerning con-cerning current stories. The story which is built on facts, or the bit of gossip which is cruel but1 true, will not work an injustice nor injure the innocent. inno-cent. But the tale prefaced by the little phrase, "They sav," is reasonably sure to drag some guiltless party through the mire nf scandel and suffering." The above statement is in general a correct statement of conditions as they acturally exist so far as they relate to the position of men and women with inspect to gossiping, taken as a whole the country over, but here in Cedar City we have a few men who would take a rating as high as most any woman when it comes to stating stat-ing as facts something which is absolutely untrue. They have a masked disregard for scandal and libel laws, and come very near at times to placing themselves within the clutches of the law by reason of such conduct. Men who resort to such measures may gain a temporary advantage advant-age but the time is sure to come when they will react, and jfrove a boomerang. If there is one passage of scripture that is more clearly proven every day than any other it is that one which says, "be sure your sins will find you out." |