Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/83

for the sake of the universe, a paltry, shortsighted means of defence. It is language that binds us all together; by it we understand and depend upon each other; to misuse it is to falsify our mutual relations. There can be no real helping, no friendship, no wide business, no true internationality, unless words are truthful.

The twin of truthfulness, its counterpart, is honesty. Both older people and children start indignantly on being told to be honest, as if stealing were confined to commodities alone. Yet there is much actual theft in society. We steal each other's ideas, patterns for dresses, embroideries, furniture, and display them as if inventions of our own brain. What is done by our French maid we call ours, her wages giving us a lien on her handiwork. There is also what sisters call freemasonry, and what sisterless people term purloining, which consists in free use of each other's ribbons and jewels. Members