Even men who are habitually profane always feel a contemptuous yet pitying regret when they hear a foul word fall from a mouth they expected to be clean.  You want people you live among to believe in you.  They are not going to believe in you spontaneously.  You are on trial every day of your first few years among them.  As you go in and out among them they acquire a confidence in you which finally grows into an unquestioning faith.  Beware how you start, in the minds of men whose good-will you must have, a question as to whether their good opinion of you is justified or not.  Profanity will create such a question.

I remember having heard the most promising young lawyer in a certain town swear in the presence of a conservative old banker who had begun to “take the young man up” and was giving him some business.  The gray-bearded man of money made no comment, but I noted a slight lifting of the eyebrows.  That young man had unconsciously started a question of himself in the mind of the man whose business friendship he was seeking.  How did that question run?

“What’s this?  An oath!  I’m surprised.  How does this young fellow happen to swear?  Perhaps I do not know as much of him as I ought to.  I must look into his antecedents more closely.  What kind of training has he had?  What other bad habits has he had, and has he now?  Yes, certainly I must look into this young man a little more before I trust him further.”

That is how the question ran in the old man’s mind.  And nobody can tell whether he ever did completely trust the young fellow again or not.  A subconscious inquiry was doubtless always present whenever that young man’s work was mentioned.  No matter whether the old banker’s caution was justified; no matter whether this sensitiveness to the language which the young man used is reasonable or not—­the young man needs all the respect and confidence he can possibly get.  It is a good thing for him to have the admiration of those among whom he dwells, but their respect and confidence he must have.  He cannot get along without that.  Let him be clean of speech, therefore.

This growing prejudice against profanity is not unreasonable.  Oaths indicate a poverty of language—­of ideas.  The thief, the burglar, the low-class criminal everywhere, expresses all his emotions by oaths.  Are they angry?  They swear.  Surprised?  They swear.  Delighted?  They swear.  Every conception of the mind, every impulse of the blood, is expressed in the narrow and base vocabulary of profanity.  So that the first thing an oath indicates is that he who uses it has limited intellectual resources, otherwise he would not employ so commonplace a method of expressing himself.

Then, too, we quite unconsciously connect the swearing man with the class which habitually employs profanity as the staple of its talk; and so he who uses an oath in our presence automatically sinks to a little lower level in our esteem.  We cannot help it.  We do not reason out the why and wherefore of it, but we know it is so.