Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill AN EXPERIMENT IN VERACITY EVERY nation on the continent of Europe speaks of the " Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy " as of an ascertained fact. It lends some plausibility to their view that confessedly one of the least politic and most reckless things a man in public life in the United States can do is supposed to be to speak of the facts as he knows them, to say the word that rises to his lips, to rely on his sincerity, honesty, and intelligence, and to leave his "record" to take care of itself. In particular, in the United States, it is supposed to be fatal for any man to say what he thinks about differences in classes, or in race, or in religion, or for that matter in sex, in the audience before him; or to recognise that such differences exist, unless the recognition is a mere point of departure for flattering the poor, if the audience be of the poor, or the rich, if the audience be of the rich, or the Irish or the Jews or the Catholics or women, if the audience be Irish or Jewish or Catholic or feminine. The candidate for the office of District Attorney neglected the sage precaution of flattering his audience, and referred from the platform to the men about him, who had his interest at heart, and who protested against his indiscretion, as " a lot of fluttering wet hens." " I am surrounded," he said, reckless of mixed metaphor, " by a lot of fluttering wet hens, who, whenever I am scheduled to speak, cackle as if they had laid an egg, that I must not say this, and that I must explain that, and that if I do happen to say this, that, and the other, I shall be misunderstood. Well, I have taken it into my head that the things that I am saying are true, and I will take my chances of their being misunderstood, or wilfully misinterpreted and misreported. I have taken it into my head th...