Article January 1, 1910 Issue

The world today is exercised throughout on tuberculosis

New Bern (N. C.) Journal

The world today is exercised throughout on tuberculosis. Municipal cleanliness is being taught and enforced. Filth is held as sinful, and the prize goes where there is the least infection. But that which is equally a health tonic, that which can help materially in warding off disease, is cheerful and profitable talk, conversation that goes above the low things of the day and partakes of the things that make for righteousness. The usual conversation of the day is of petty things. The personal goes into details of individual aches and pains, branching off, perhaps, into the scandals, deaths, casualties, and various horrors recorded all too carefully in the newspapers.

The world needs the spread of healthy conversation coming from healthy minds. The disagreeable ought to be relegated to the silent background, while everything promoting cheerfulness, therefore healthfulness, should be thrust forward to be talked and discussed. Books of dark deeds, the tragic drama, have few readers and followers, and yet every day men and women will discuss in detail aches and pains, gossip and scandal, which are real tragedies that pull down and distort a world that is capable of better and more gracious things. All these idle words make the world a huge ill-smelling place for the family circle, for society, for business, for the church. Just reverse the order, and why might not the world be filled with an atmosphere transferring healthy germs, and destroying the germs of foulness and all unwholesomeness through a contagious conversation looking toward pure things?

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