"than to speak it ungraciously."

There are times doubtless when candour goes straight to its goal,
and courtesy misses the mark. Mr. John Stuart Mill was once asked
upon the hustings whether or not he had ever said that the English
working-classes were mostly liars. He answered shortly, "I
did!"--and the unexpected reply was greeted with loud applause. Mr.
Mill was wont to quote this incident as proof of the value which
Englishmen set upon plain speaking. They do prize it, and they prize
the courage which defies their bullying. But then the remark was,
after all, a generalization. We can bear hearing disagreeable truths
spoken to a crowd or to a congregation--causticity has always been
popular in preachers--because there are other heads than our own upon
which to fit the cap.

The brutalities of candour, the pestilent wit which blights whatever
it touches, are not distinctively American. It is because we are a
humorous rather than a witty people that we laugh for the most part
with, and not at, our fellow creatures. Indeed, judged by the
unpleasant things we might say and do not say, we should be esteemed
polite. English memoirs teem with anecdotes which appear to us
unpardonable. Why should Lady Holland have been permitted to wound
the susceptibilities of all with whom she came in contact? When Moore
tells us that she said to him, "This book of yours" (the "Life of
Sheridan") "will be dull, I fear;" and to Lord Porchester, "I am sorry
to hear you are going to publish a poem. Can't you suppress it?" we
do not find these remarks to be any more clever than considerate.
They belong to the category of the monumentally uncouth.

Why should Mr. Abraham Hayward have felt it his duty (he put it that