all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and
international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for
his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings
which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars,
insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the
enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will
perhaps never entirely eradicate.

Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip.
Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France,
though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and
misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship
of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on
both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by
distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe
about one another.

It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of
the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has
largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.

It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before
nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make
mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few
irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had
no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The
proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted
in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that
the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and
immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to
bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.

Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some
approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old
misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their
guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to
tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages
for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the
interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are
liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than
the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.

When we come to consider the operat