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: