Carroll Free Press

From the Southern Literary Messenger.

POLITENESS AND HOSPITALITY.

I see friendship, love, common sense and common honesty sacrificed every hour to what is called politeness. I see woman every day—out of respect, as they say, to their husbands—tricked out with better dress, with better looks, and with better humor to receive strangers than to receive a husband. The rogues persuading the good, easy fool, when they give other men a cleaner table cloth and a better dinner, that they do it out of respect for him!

Abominable! They treat the lord of their affections, the partner of their bed, the father of their children, worse than any other man!—they do indeed—there's no denying it.

'Tis all a wicked profligate, cold-hearted lie, and they know it. They call it hospitality! Worse and worse! Hospitality is not ostentation—hospitality in simple and sincere. No, they want to please a stranger!—to deceive him even for an hour—to appear better off in the world, richer and more comfortable than they really are. They are secretly tired of home—of that plain, quiet, comfortable, beautiful decency which makes home so dear to a man.

Such women are sure to be sluts and hypocrites, just in proportion to the difference they make between their household and the world—the stranger and their husband. They go slipshod about the house, their caps on one side, their hair flying loose, and themselves fitter for a horse pond than a marriage bed or a dinner table until, mercy to their husband, some stranger knocks at the door.

"Oh! but if you ask a man to dine with you, you must give him something better than pork and eggs."

"Not if I eat pork and beans myself."

"But he'll be offended."

Let him. He's a fool if he expects to be treated at my own house, by my own wife, better than myself.