་ ale and bread,' the dainty Madame Eglantine's greatest oath is only By St Eloy.' 'By Jove' and By George' are still heard; the dickens' (devil) already occurs in the Merry Wives; the deuce' is at least of the 17th century, although hardly Middle English, pace Professor Skeat; By the living Jingo' has been boldly described as Basque, and was rendered classic by the Vicar of Wakefield; Etheredge and Dryden write 'bloody drunk;' Swift, 'bloody cold' and 'bloody sick early examples of one of the most odious of modern vulgarisms; the Duke of Wellington's twopenny damn' (of which there is an attempted innocent explanation) almost died with him; Queen Elizabeth, James I., Lord Thurlow, Picton, and Lord Melbourne, all notorious swearers, were catholic in their choice of oaths. The prophecy of Bob Acres (Rivals, ii. 1), that damns have had their day,' has not yet entirely come true, although the reformation of manners has long since driven swearing from the quarter-deck, and a Squire Western is now more than a phenomenon. Swift's Swearer's Bank (Scott's Swift, vol. vii.) is a characteristic satire on the profanity of his day. It is computed by geographers, he begins, that there are two millions in this kingdom [Ireland], of which number there may be said to be a million of swearing souls. It is thought that there may be 5000 gentlemen, each with one oath a day at a shilling each, yielding an annual revenue of £91,250. All classes of citizens contribute to this revenue, the farmers, the commonality, the hundred pretty fellows in Dublin alone at fifty oaths a head daily, the oaths of a little Connaught fair themselves computed at 3000. Militia under arms are to be exempted, nor is any advantage to be taken of any man's swearing in the Four Courts, provided he is at hearing in the exchequer or has just paid an attorney's bill. As for its medicinal use to help the lungs to throw off any distilling humour, on certificate of a course of swearing granted by any physician a permit may be issued to the patient, but all other licenses, compositions, or indulgences whatever are prohibited. Romans: Pythagoras is said to have sworn by the number four; Zeno, by the caper; Socrates used mild oaths, as By the dog,' and Aristophanes tells of a time when no men swore by the gods, but all by birds. The Romans used Mehercule,'' Medius Fidius,' 'Edepol,' 'Ecastor,' and 'Mecastor' (properly a woman's oath), &c. Brantôme tells us Louis XI. said 'Par la Pâque Dieu; the oath of Francis I. was characteristic Foi de gentilhomme.' 'Ventre Saint-Gris,' again, was one of the Gascon oaths of Henry IV. of France, which he alternated with another favourite, Jarnidieu.' Many of the modern French oaths, as Parbleu' (par Dieu), Corbleu' (corps de Dieu), Ventrebleu,' and 'Sacrebleu,' are illustrations of a process of softening an oath by a deliberate disguise, like the old-fashioned 'Gad' and Egad,' the north country Dod' and 'Scush' (God's curse), and the older English "Slight' (God's light), 'Od's fish' the usual oath of Charles II., Zounds' (God's wounds), 'Od's bodikins,' and the American Darn.' Similarly in Italy, between the severe laws against profanity and blasphemy and the necessity of confession, forms like 'Per Dio' became in early times disguised as Per Dinci.' Indeed the Italians, especially in Tuscany, are extraordinarily rich in oaths, many strange and grotesque forms being in use, and the meanings of common forms being carefully differentiated. Mr Story tells us that Dio mio' is proper as an expression of sudden surprise, 'Madonna mia' of pity and sorrow, 'Per Christo' of hatred and revenge. Nothing on the Continent strikes an English ear more strangely than the familiar use of 'Dieu' in France and of such phrases as Herr Je' in Germany, and English reticence refuses to accept the over-subtle apology even of a Cardinal Newman (Lect. on Certain Diffic. ix.), that this variety and fertility in adjurations and invocations is merely because a Catholic populace has a greater insight into the unseen world than a Protestant. The Catholic's very jesting, and his very oaths, have been overruled,' says he, 'to create in him a habit of faith, girding round and protecting the supernatural principle.' But it is proper to explain that what James Howell calls this infandous custom of swearing' is to Continentals specially an English characteristic. Indeed Howell himself, after enumerating the performances of the German, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Welshman, the Irishman, and the Scot, admits that for variety of oaths the English Roarers put down all.' Byron describes how Don Juan on his first arrival in England is rudely awakened from the innocent belief that their shibboleth God damn" is a usual salutation. Beaumarchais (Le Mariage de Figaro, iii. 5) says, 'Avec Goddam en Angleterre on ne manque de rien nulle part. . . les Anglais à la vérité ajoutent par-ci par-là quelques autres mots en conversant; mais il est bien aisé de voir que Goddam est le fond de la langue.' We hear this phrase as a synonym for Englishman even from the pure lips of Joan of Arc, and we certainly find the oath in the other Elizabethan dramatists, and in Shakespeare, but not in any thing like its modern pre-eminence of importance. Still we find oaths enough of all shades of profanity in early English literature, and correspond-continues to hang heavy over our canals and ing denunciations in the writings of preachers like Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Fuller, down to the days of that genial but true moralist, the Spectator. A few of the more common old English oaths-all in Shakespeare-were 'Bodikins,' By Cock and Pie' (God and the Romish service-book), 'Cock's passion,' By 'r Lady,' Marry' (the Virgin Mary), By my halidom' (holiness), Od's me,''Sblood,' 'Gramercy,' 'By the rood' (the Cross), "Shrew me.' Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales uses 'By St The church ever denounced profane swearing, but was powerless to check the practice. Chrysostom spent twenty homilies upon it, and St Augustine's judgment is summed up with unnecessary severity in the solemn passage, 'Non minus peccant qui blasphemant Christum regnantem in cœlis quam qui crucifixerunt ambulantem in terris.' For much of our popular swearing is little more than the mere habit of vocabulary, a sin only from the lips outward, as Bishop Lightfoot said of the habitual profanity of the colliers of his diocese. Again, where swearing is a professional custom it is scarce possible to exist without conforming, and after all words have in themselves no absolute but a relative meaning. Our armies swore terribly in Flanders' in my Uncle Toby's time, nor was the practice extinct till long after the great French wars. And have we not still our familiar proverb to swear like a trooper.' But swearing has disappeared from the parade-ground, though it still lingers in the barrack-room. swear like a bargee,' however, is a proverb still justifiable by the facts--an atmosphere of oaths To rivers. We are told that Robert Burton at last could only be made to laugh by going down to the Bridgefoot in Oxford and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear. The old forms of excommunication in ecclesiastical use supplied forms enough, and the specimen of the powers of Ernulphus given in Tristram Shandy certainly displays an orientality we can not rise up to, a copiousness of invention, a possession of all the excellencies of a swearer SWEAT which make it impossible to swear out of it.' The advantage of a theological vocabulary is seen further in Scott's story of the swearing-bout between a skipper and a broken-down minister, where the latter swore his antagonist dumb with a copiousness and variety he could not equal. In England the growth of Puritanism was marked by a series of attempts to stamp out swearing. In 1601 a measure for this end was introduced into the House of Commons, and one was carried in 1623. 'Not a man swears but pays his twelve pence,' says Cromwell proudly of his Ironsides. As early as 1606 swearing in plays had been forbidden, and even Ben Jonson himself narrowly escaped the £10 penalty. An act of 1645 in Scotland details the penalties to be inflicted, even on ministers of religion-it will be remembered that Barham recommends these not to go beyond 'zooks.' Shirley's play, The Young Admiral (1633), is especially noted as 'free from oaths, profaneness, and obsceneness.' When Davenant's Wits next was presented to Sir Henry Herbert for license, the latter crossed out many expressions. Davenant appealed to the king, who directed the Master of the Revels to allow such words as Faith,' 'Death,' and 'Slight.' Sir Henry made the following entry in his office-book: The king is pleased to take "Faith,' "Death," and "Slight for asseverations and no oaths, to which I do humbly submit as my master's judgment; but under favour conceive them to be oaths, and enter them here to declare my opinion and submission.' St Paul's Cathedral is supposed to have been built without an oath, the regulations of Sir Christopher Wren being so stringent, and this may be allowed to remain its most remarkable distinction. year 93 66 Profane swearing, according to the law of England, is an offence for which the party may be convicted under an act of George II. by a justice of the peace according to a scale of penalties. A day labourer, common soldier, sailor, or seaman forfeits Is. per oath; every other person under the degree of a gentleman, 2s. ; and every person above the degree of a gentleman, 5s. ; for a second offence, double these sums; for a third, treble, &c. If the cursing take place in presence of a justice of the peace, the latter may convict the swearer then and there, without further process or evidence; and in all cases a constable may apprehend a profane swearer, and carry him before a justice. On one occasion a man swore a volley of oaths, twenty times repeating the oath, and the justices fined him 2s. for each repetition, making in all £2, and this was held a proper conviction. It seems that this act does not apply to women; but there are provisions of a more general character in several modern police acts which impose a penalty for using profane or obscene language in public places. The justices of the peace in Scotland have a similar jurisdiction, to convict of profane swearing, and fine according to the rank of the party. See articles on BLASPHEMY and OATH; also Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (1884). Sweat (A.S. swát), the moisture exuded by the skin, in which about 2 per cent. of solid matters is present, consisting of salt; formic, acetic, butyric, and other fatty acids; neutral fats; and cholesterin. The manner of its excretion, its uses, &c. are considered at Skin (q.v.). Sweating Sickness, an extremely fatal epidemical disorder, which ravaged Europe, and especially England, in the 15th and 16th centuries. It derives its name because it did most stand in sweating from the beginning until the endyng,' and, because it first beganne in Englande, it was named in other countries the Englishe sweat.' It first appeared in London in September 1485, shortly All after the entry of Henry VII. with the army which had won the battle of Bosworth Field on August 22. It was a violent inflammatory fever which, after a short rigor, prostrated the powers as with a blow, and, amidst painful oppression at the stomach, headache, and lethargic stupor, suffused the whole body with a fetid perspiration. this took place in the course of a few hours, and the crisis was always over within the space of a day and night. The internal heat which the patient suffered was intolerable, yet every refrigerant was certain death. 'Scarce one amongst a hundred that sickened did escape with life' (Holinshed )— -a statement which, while probably greatly exaggerated, illustrates the dread with which the malady came to be regarded. Two lord mayors of London and four aldermen died within one week; and the disease for the most part seized as its victims robust and vigorous men. It lasted in London from the 21st of September to the end of October, during which short period many thousands' died from it. The physicians could do little or nothing to combat the disease, which at length was swept away from England by a violent tempest on New-year's Day. In the summer of 1508 it reappeared in London, and in July 1517 it again broke out in London in a most virulent form, carrying off some of those who were seized by it within four hours. It seems chiefly to have attacked those in the upper classes or in comfortable circumstances. In many towns a third or even a half of the inhabitants are said to have been swept away, again probably an overstatement. On this occasion the epidemic lasted about four months. In May 1528 the year in which the French army before Naples was destroyed by pestilence, and in which the putrid fever known as Trousse-galant decimated the youth in France-the sweating sickness again broke out in the metropolis, spread rapidly over the whole kingdom, and fourteen months later brought a scene of horror upon all the nations of northern Europe, scarcely equalled in any other epidemic.' How many lives were lost in this epidemic, which has been called by some historians the great mortality, is unknown; the fact that King Henry VIII. left London, and endeavoured to avoid the disease by continually travelling, shows the general feeling of alarm that existed. We hear of it at Calais in the same year, but nowhere else out of England. In the following summer, having apparently died out in England, it appeared in Germany, first at Hamburg, where it is recorded that 8000 persons died of it, and shortly after at Lübeck, Stettin, Augsburg, Cologne, Strasburg, Hanover, &c. In September it broke out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, whence it penetrated into Lithuania, Poland, and Livonia; but after three months it had entirely disappeared from all these countries. For threeand-twenty years the sweating sickness totally disappeared, when for the last time (March or April 1551) it burst forth in Shrewsbury, spread rapidly over the whole of England, but disappeared by the end of September. The deaths were so the disorder caused a depopulation of the kingnumerous that one historian (Stow) states that dom. The very remarkable observation was made in this year that the sweating sickness uniformly spared foreigners in England, and on the other hand followed the English into foreign countries. The immoderate use of beer amongst the English was considered by many as the principal reason why the sweating sickness was confined to them. Since 1551 the disease has never appeared as it did then and at earlier periods. Its nearest ally is Sudamina (q.v.), or miliary eruption, which has appeared in frequent, but usually limited, epidemies in France, Italy, and Germany (still called there the English sweat'), during the 18th and 19th centuries, sometimes, as in the dept. of Vienna in 1887, in so severe and even fatal a form as to suggest the older epidemic in miniature. See Dr John Caius, A Boke against the Sweatyng Sicknesse (1552); Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages (Syd. Soc. Trans.); Hirsch, Geographical and Historical Pathology (New Syd. Soc. Trans., vol. i. p. 82); and Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain (1891). the middleman is the consequence, not the cause of the evil; the instrument, not the hand which gives motion to the instrument, which does the mischief. Moreover, the middleman is found to be absent in many cases in which the evils complained of abound. Own On the other hand, the middleman or sub-contractor is certainly present in very numerous instances in which the evils of sweating are absent. Thus, in the cotton trade, the 'minders' employ their own piecers;' in the iron trade a great number of operations are entrusted to subcontractors (puddlers' employing their 'underhands,' hammermen employing their own assistants, &c.); sub-contract is widely prevalent in mines and quarries, in the shipbuilding and in numerous other industries, but is in these cases unaccompanied by serious oppression of the workers, and is not called the sweating system. The sub-contractor usually himself performs a part, generally the most difficult part, of the work, and in all cases renders useful services by organising and directing the labour of his subordinates; while the remuneration which he receives is, as a rule, by no means out of proportion to the importance of the duties which he fulfils. But, since the amount of his remuneration depends directly upon his getting his employees to do a maximum of work for a minimum of pay, the sub-contractor, especially if his workpeople are deficient in skill or incompetent to combine against oppression, tends to become a greedy and exacting task-master. Before the final Report of the Lords' Committee was issued the sweating system had been abolished in the metropolitan docks and in the greater part of the London boot trade by successful strikes. Since its publication most of the principal legis lative provisions recommended in this report have been made. See the Factory and Workshop Act, 1891, and the Public Health (London) Act, 1891. The duty of the nation to secure that those who do recognised by parliament, and is carried out by the its work shall be fairly treated has been formally government, which not only interferes to obtain for the workpeople employed by its contractors the full current rate of wages, but has in a recent important contract provided that the contractor, unless expressly authorised, shall not either subcontract the work or employ any taskmen'-i.e. Sweating System. This subject was first brought prominently before the public in 1847-48 by the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and subsequently by a pamphlet (Cheap Clothes and Nasty) and a novel (Alton Locke), both from the pen of Charles Kingsley. It was shown that some of the journeymen tailors, instead of doing the work on the premises of their masters, had commenced the practice of taking the garments to their own houses, where they called in the assistance of their families and of other persons. This system was called the Sweating (i.e. over-working) System,' because the persons employed under it worked harder than the public opinion of the men in the tailoring trade considered reasonable; just as an unconscionably industrious schoolboy is reproached by his fellows for 'swatting.' The term, the sweating system,' soon began to be applied to more or less analogous practices in other trades, and generally to all practices objected to by the workers. Sweating' is now used to denote unfair treatment of any kind, without reference to any particular system of employment. But the sweating system is still chiefly applied to cases in which work is sub-contracted-i.e. in which a principal employer, instead of having the work done by men in his own employment, hands it over to a middleman,' who gets it done with the assistance of persons engaged by him for the purpose. In some cases the subcontractor and his employees work on the premises of the principal employer, this type of middleman being usually called a piece-master.' But, as a rule, when the sweating system is spoken of reference is made to the 'sweating master' or garret master,' who employs his workpeople in his own 'sweating-den.' In February 1888 a select committee of the House of Lords was appointed to examine into the sweating system in East London, the reference being afterwards extended to cover the United Kingdom. The industries investigated included the tailoring trade, shirt-making, mantle-making, furriery, boot-making, cabinet-piece-master foremen. Many public bodies (includmaking and upholstery, chain and nail making, the cutlery and hardware trades, and also dock labour and government contracts. The final Report of this committee, published in April 1890, states that the earnings of the lowest class of workers are barely sufficient to sustain existence. The hours of labour are such as to make the lives of the workers periods of almost ceaseless toil, hard and often unhealthy. The sanitary conditions under which the work is conducted are not only injurious to the health of the persons employed, but are dangerous to the public, especially in the case of the trades concerned in making clothes, as infectious diseases are spread by the sale of garments made in rooms inhabited by persons suffering from smallpox and other diseases. As a rule, however, it must be remembered that the observations made in respect to sweating apply, in the main, to unskilled or only partially skilled workers, as the thoroughly skilled workers can almost always obtain adequate wages.' blaming employers as regardless of the moral obligations which attach to capital when they take contracts to supply articles and know nothing of the condition of the workers by whom such articles are made, leaving to a sub-contractor the duty of selecting the workers,' the committee declare that While ing the London County Council and the municipal authorities of Birmingham, Gloucester, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesborough, Nottingham, Salford, Sheffield, Sunderland, and West Ham) now require their contractors to pay full current wages; and in numerous cases contractors engaged on public works are prevented from sub-contracting, except so far as sub-contract is usual and necessary. Further details in respect to the sweating system will be found in three Reports by Mr J. Burnett, Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade: (a) on the Sweating System at the East End of London; (b) on the Sweating System in Leeds; and (c) on the Nail Makers and Small Chain Makers in South Staffordshire and East Worcestershire (1887, 331; 1888, c. 5513; 1888, 385, Eyre & Spottiswoode); the five Reports, Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, and Index of the Lords' Committee on the Sweating System; Booth, Labour and Life of the People (especially vol. i.); and Methods of Industrial Remuneration, by the present writer, David Schloss. See also the article IMMIGRATION. Sweden (Sverige), a kingdom of northern Europe, occupying the eastern side of the Scandinavian peninsula. The Skager Copyright 1892 in U.S. Rack and the Cattegat touch by J. B. Lippincott its south-western shores. In the far north-east it is separated from (Russian) Finland Company. |