There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.  In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries.  They are the fruitful cause of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps never entirely eradicate.

Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip.  Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, though divided but by a narrow strait, “natural enemies” and misunderstood monsters to each other.  In a less degree, the friendship of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on both sides.  And as for races and nations more widely separated by distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe about one another.

It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of the Orient as human beings at all.  And all this misunderstanding has largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.

It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment.  The proverbial “gaiety of nations” has always, in a great degree, consisted in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and immoral, to say the least.  Such reports the traveller was expected to bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.

Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old misconceptions die hard.  Nations need still to be constantly on their guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them about other countries.  Electricity, many as are its advantages for cosmopolitan rapprochements, is not invariably employed in the interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.

When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting rumour is pitifully conspicuous.  We know Hamlet’s opinion on the matter: