And yet there is no part of us which Nature has fenced with so excellent a barricade as the tongue. In front of that organ it has planted a guard in the shape of the teeth, so that, if it will not obey orders and pull itself together inside when reason tightens the ‘_silence-working reins_‘,[43] we may check its rashness by biting it till it bleeds. The phrase of Euripides is that ‘_disaster is the end_’ not of an ‘unchained’ treasury or storeroom, but of an ‘_unchained mouth_‘. To recognize that a storeroom without a door, or a purse without a fastening, is of no use to the owner, and yet to possess a mouth without lock or door, but with as perpetual an outflow as the mouth of the [Sidenote: D] Black Sea, is to set the lowest possible value on speech. The result is that such a person meets with no belief, though all speech has that object, its final cause being to create precisely such credence in the hearer. A chatterer is disbelieved even when he tells the truth. For as wheat, when shut in a bin, is found to increase in bulk but to deteriorate in quality, so, when a story finds its way into a chatterer, it generates a large addition of falsehood and its credibility is thereby corrupted. Again, any self-respecting and well-behaved person will beware of drunkenness. For while—as some put it—anger lives next door to madness, drunkenness lives in the same house. [Sidenote: E] Or rather it _is_ madness, of shorter duration, it is true, but more culpable, as being in a measure voluntary. But the charge most seriously urged against drunkenness is its intemperate and irresponsible language: _For though right shrewd be a man, wine eggs him on till he singeth; It loosens him that he laughs with a feeble laughter, and danceth._ Yet if this were the worst—singing, laughing, and dancing—there would be, so far, nothing very terrible. _And he letteth slip some speech, the which were better unspoken_:— [Sidenote: F] that is where the mischief and danger begin.