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.

The habit is creeping up into the higher circles.  Every woman despises flat and unvarnished imprecations; but in the most elevated circles there are women who swear without knowing it.  They have read Bulwer, and George Sand, and the exaggerated style of some of our imported as well as home-made periodical literature, until they do not actually know what is decency of speech.  With fairy fan to their lips they utter their oaths, and, under chandeliers which discover not the faintest blush, recklessly speak the holiest of names.  This is helped on by the second glass of wine, that is perfectly harmless; and though no one dare charge her, being so finely dressed, with anything like intoxication, yet there comes a glassiness to the eye, and a glow to the cheek, and a style of speech to the tongue that were not known before she took the second glass that was perfectly harmless.

One wild, terrific wave of blasphemy is sweeping over the land.  See the effects of this widespread profanity in the increasing perjury.  If men in ordinary conversation so commonly use the name of God, is it wonderful that in the jury-box, and in the alderman’s office, and in the custom-house so many swear falsely?  Notice the way an oath is administered.  They toss the Bible at a man, and in the most trivial way say:  “So help you God—­kiss the book.”  I suppose enough lies are every day told in the custom-house to sink it.  Smuggling, although it be done against positive oath, is in some circles considered a grand joke; and you say some day to your friend, “How can you sell those goods so cheaply?” and your friend says with an eye-twinkle, “The Custom-House tariff was not as high on those things as it might have been.”  Men more easily break their solemn oaths than formerly.  What strange verdicts juries do sometimes render!  What peculiar charges judges do sometimes make!  What unaccountable slowness sheriffs and their deputies sometimes exhibit in the execution of their writs!  What erratic railroad enterprises suddenly pass at our State capitals!  What wonderful changes Congress makes in the tariff on liquors!