EVILS OF GOSSIP.

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 9, 1 December 1877, Page 4

EVILS OF GOSSIP.

(From the " Exchange.") I HAVE know a country society which withered away all to nothing under the dry root of gossip. Friendships once as firm as granite dissolved to jelly, ami then ran away to water, only because of this; love, that promised a future as enduring as Heaven and as stable "ts Truth, evaporated into a morning mist that turned to a day's long tears, only because of this; a father and son were set foot to foot with the fiery breath of an anger that would nevel cool again between them ; and a husband and his young wife, each straining at the heated lash which in the beginning had been the golden-bandage of a God-blessed love, sat mournfully by the grave where all their love and all their joy lay buried, and all because of this. I have seen faith transformed to mean doubt, joy give place to grim despair, and charity take on itself the features of black malevolence, all because of the small words of scandal, and the magic niutterings of gossip. Great crimes work great wrongs, and deeper tragedies of human life spring up from the larger passions; but woeful and most mournful are the uneatalogued tragedies that issue from gossip, and detraction; most mournful the shipwreck of noble natures and lovely lives by bitter winds and dead salt waters of slander. So easy to say, yet so hard to 'disprove—throwing on the innocent all the burden and the strain of demonstrating their innocence, and punishing them as guilty if unable to pluck out the stings they cannot see, and to silence words they never hear—gossip and slander are the deadliest and cruellest weapons man has ever forged for his brother's heart.