The Hawaiian Gazette

More than any other people in the world, Americans live with their doors open. Less than any people who have homes do they regard their homes as sacredly private. Every family knows its neighbors' affairs; and nothing transpires concerning the most private relations that is not immediately noised abroad, discussed, and judged by meddling and gossiping communities. Homes that should be guarded with the most jealous care are of easy access to strangers, who come with the flimsiest credentials, or with none at all; and every year produces its crop of personal and social disasters which this unwise exposure of the soil gives to reckless or villainous sowing.

If a man should wish to see how Americans differ in this thing from other nations, let him try to get into a German or an English family, or even into a French family, abroad. He will at once discover that he has undertaken to do a very difficult thing. No man can obtain an inside view of the economies and habits of a foreign home, and share in its communion, who does not enter it with a record or an introduction and indorsement which place him above suspicion. Students who go to continental Europe to study languages, with the natural expectation to accomplish their purpose by entering a German or a French family, find, to their surprise, that nothing but necessity will induce any family to open its sanctities to them.

It will naturally be said that old or mature communities are conservative in this, as in other matters; but we do not see that, as America grows older, it mends in this respect. Indeed, it is certainly and swiftly growing worse. The greed for personalities—the taste for everything relating to the life of individuals—and the base desire to be talked about, were never more prevalent than now. We have only to take up a fashionable paper to learn who has had parties, who attended the parties, who were the belles of the parties, and how they were dressed; and we know while we read that the ladies who gave the parties gave also the information concerning them, and were glad to see the reports in print. Weddings, which should be sacred to kindred and closest friends, are turned into public shows; the trousseaus are inventoried by the daily prints and spread before the country. It is not enough that one's marriage be published when it takes place, but the engagement must be bruited in Jenkins's Journal, Jenkins having previously been assured that the announcement would not be offensive, and subsequently repaid by an order for extra papers. The inanities of the Court Journal, over which Americans were in the habit of laughing twelve years ago, are more than matched by the daily report of the movements of every man of title, or place, or notoriety. When a woman lectures, the reporters understand that the first thing people wish to learn about her relates to her face, figure and dress; and that is the first thing they write about. The women of the platform—being all vain—are of course not offended by this treatment; but it somehow happens that the reports are generally of a flattering character.

It would be possible to get along with all this. A man may become used to smothering his sense of humiliation and disgust when reading the public record of private life, so long as that record is made with the consent, or at the wish of those to whom it relates; but it happens that we have in America now a prowling, prying, far-seeing, vivacious, loquacious, voracious being known as the Local Editor, who must get a living, and who lives only upon items. If a man sneezes twice in his presence, the local column of the morning paper will contain the announcement that "our esteemed fellow-citizen" is suffering from a severe cold. If a man loses his hat in a high wind, it exercises the mirth of the local editor to the extent of a dozen lines. He amplifies an accident that kills, or a scandal that ruins, with marvelous minuteness of detail. His eye is at every man's back-door, to see and report who and what go and come. There is nothing safe from his pen. All the private affairs of the community for which he writes are published to that community every day. If a man shoots a dog or catches a string of trout, or rides out for his health, or is seen mysteriously leaving town on an evening train, or sells a horse, or buys a cow, or gives a dinner party, or looks sallow, or grows fat, or smiles upon a widow, or renews the wallpaper of his house, he gives the local editor an item. The local editor turns the houses of the community inside out every day, and keeps the windows open by which the secrets and sanctities of every home are exposed to public view.

The local editor is, we regret to say, not without excuse. Occasionally some indignant victim of his prying and publishing propensities scolds or scourges him; but it must be confessed, with shame and sorrow, that his local column finds a greedy market. Instead of frowning upon the liberty he takes with persons and homes, and the details of individual private life, the multitude read his column first of all. That its results are mischievous and demoralizing in their ministry to neighborhood gossip and scandal, there is no doubt. Among its worst results is the destruction of all reverence for the right of every private man to live privately, and of every home to live with its windows closed. There is unquestionably a desire in a certain sort of private life to get into the papers—a desire to spread all the details of its doings before the world. This life may be "high" or low, fashionable or unfashionable, but it is irredeemably vulgar, and can only disgust every self-respectful and dignified man and woman. Let us protest on behalf of decency against the familiar treatment which the retiring and the unwilling receive in the local column, and in the more ambitious performances of the omnipresent Jenkins. Let us at least have the privilege of repeating the cry of Betsy Trotwood, when her little patch of green was invaded. "Janet! donkeys!"—Dr. J. G. Holland in Scribner's for June.