surgeon or a surgeon dentist may correct a deformity, but your own will, working

by self-observation and resolution in drill, will break a habit. All depends

upon whether you think it worth while.

 

Defective speech is so widespread that freedom from it is the exception. It is

painfully common to hear public speakers mutilate the king's English. If they do

not actually murder it, as Curran once said, they often knock an _i_ out.

 

A Canadian clergyman, writing in the _Homiletic Review_, relates that in his

student days "a classmate who was an Englishman supplied a country church for a

Sunday. On the following Monday he conducted a missionary meeting. In the course

of his address he said some farmers thought they were doing their duty toward

missions when they gave their 'hodds and hends' to the work, but the Lord

required more. At the close of the meeting a young woman seriously said to a

friend: 'I am sure the farmers do well if they give their hogs and hens to

missions. It is more than most people can afford.'"

 

It is insufferable effrontery for any man to appear before an audience who

persists in driving the _h_ out of happiness, home and heaven, and, to

paraphrase Waldo Messaros, will not let it rest in hell. He who does not show

enough self-knowledge to see in himself such glaring faults, nor enough

self-mastery to correct them, has no business to instruct others. If he _can_ do

no better, he should be silent. If he _will_ do no better, he should also be

silent.