Pot-Pourri 2 1 5 



newspaper makes the most money which caters 

 successfully to the greatest number of readers. 

 The journalists of the West are neither ignorant 

 nor prejudiced. But they are free lances fighting, 

 and fighting hard, for little more than bread and 

 butter. Their taskmasters instruct them to weave 

 ropes out of sand, to make bricks without straw. 

 One man, a man of letters too, told me that he had 

 instructions from his boss to embellish fifteen out 

 of the sixteen pages of his newspaper with either 

 a murder or a suicide. The sixteenth, the editorial 

 page, was kept immaculate^ because — so said my 

 friend — it was never read! Bits of description — 

 a visit to a children's hospital, the departure of a 

 troopship, a presidential election — are done de- 

 lightfully, charmingly, with a gift of vivid expres- 

 sion, an informing joyous humanity, a sparkle and 

 sympathy seldom found in the columns of the great 

 London dailies. But " no talent," to quote George 

 Lewes, "can be supremely effective, unless it act in 

 close alliance with certain moral qualities." The 

 Western Press is profoundly immoral, because it 

 deliberately throws a glamour of attraction upon 

 vice and crime. I could cite a score of instances, 

 but one will suffice. For many months two train- 

 robbers, Evans and Sontag, set the police of Cali- 

 fornia at defiance. These men were brutes, endowed 

 with the redeeming qualities of the wild beast — 

 courage and endurance. Upon these qualities the 

 Californian Press pounced. Day after day columns 

 of brilliant description were devoted to the ad- 

 ventures, the hairbreadth escapes, the thrilling ex- 

 periences of two desperadoes. One enterprising 



