true inwardness,' 'it gives furiously to think.' It dallies with
Latinity--'sub silentio,' 'de die in diem,' 'cui bono?' (always in the
sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')--but not for the
sake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he
daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more
flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier is
his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poor
language, to make it more floriferous, more poetical--like the Babu for
example who, reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you,
the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'

_There_ is metaphor: _there_ is ornament: _there_ is a sense of poetry,
though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks--no such
zeal, artistic or professional, animates--the practitioners of Jargon,
who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons. Caution is
its father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: its
mother, Indolence. It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in these
times, _safe_: a thousand men have said it before and not one to your
knowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in
Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming the
language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of
Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms,
express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so
voice the reason of their being.

Has a Minister to say 'No' in the House of Commons? Some men are
constitutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys it
thus--'The answer to the question is in the negative.' That means 'no.'
Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that
the speaker is a pompous person?--which was no part of the information