wards
say, "may be," softly. These departures from the truth are called
"white lies;" but there is really no such thing as a white lie. The
whitest lie that was ever told was as black as perdition. No
inventory of public crimes will be sufficient that omits this gigantic
abomination. There are men, high in Church and State, actually useful,
self-denying, and honest in many things, who, upon certain subjects,
and in certain spheres, are not at all to be depended upon for
veracity. Indeed, there are multitudes of men who have their notions
of truthfulness so thoroughly perverted, that they do not know when
they _are_ lying. With many it is a cultivated sin; with some it seems
a natural infirmity. I have known people who seemed to have been born
liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave.
Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared
in their first utterances and was as natural to them as any of
their infantile diseases, and was a sort of moral croup or spiritual
scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this
tendency has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger
development. They have gone from attainment to attainment, and from
class to class, until they have become regularly graduated liars.

The air of the city is filled with falsehoods. They hang pendent from
the chandeliers of our finest residences; they crowd the shelves of
some of our merchant princes; they fill the side-walk from curb-stone
to brown-stone facing. They cluster around the mechanic's hammer,
and blossom from the end of the merchant's yard-stick, and sit in
the doors of churches. Some call them "fiction." Some style them
"fabrication." You might say that they were subterfuge,
disguise, delusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception,
misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by
the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I
shall chiefly call them what my father taught me to call them--_lies_.

I shall divide them into agricultural, mercantile, mechanical, and
ecclesiastical lies; leaving those that are professional, social, and
political for some other chapter.

First, then, I will speak of those that are more particularly
_agricultural_. There is something in the perpetual presence of
natural objects to make a man pure. The trees never issue "false
stock." Wheat-fields are always honest. Rye and oats never move out
in