Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called by-words. I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often ends in bald profanity. It is, "I declare!" "My stars!" "Mercy on me!" "Good gracious!" "By George!" "By Jove!" and "By heavens!" and no harm is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of talk to that which is positively obnoxious. The English language is magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take to ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition, and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their forked tongues,--words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored, Anglo-Saxon,--in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and Shakespeare wrote. But whatever be the source of this habit, it is on the increase. At sixteen, boys swear with as much facility as the grandfather did at sixty. Our streets are cursed by it from end to end. Our hotels, from morning until midnight, resound with it. Men curse on the way to the bar to get their morning dram; curse the news-boy who cries the paper; curse the breakfast for being cold; curse at the bank, and curse at the store; curse on the way to bed; curse at the stone against which they strike their foot; and curse at the splinter that gets under the nail. If you do not know that this is so, it is because your ear has been hardened by the perpetual din of profanities that are enough to bring down upon any city the hurricane of fire that consumed Sodom.