But all
the time, these men and families will have pressed upon their
attention and patronage, by every device and artifice of the energetic
and more or less unscrupulous publisher, other papers equally able and
brilliant and comprehensive, but bringing also their burden of
needless sensationalism and mendacity, undue expansion of all manner
of scandal, amplification of every detail and kind of crime, and every
phase of covert innuendo or open attack upon official doing and
private character--the whole infernal mass procured, and stimulated
and broadcast among the people by the "business end of it," with the
one and only intent of securing and holding circulation.
Take a representative and pertinent example. Eight years ago there
were in New York ten or eleven standard newspapers, as ably and
inclusively edited and as energetically and successfully conducted,
business-wise, as they are now. Even at their worst they were decently
mindful of life's proprieties and moralities and they throve by
legitimate sale of the most and best news and the best possible
elucidation and discussion thereof. The father could bring the paper
of his choice to his breakfast table with no fear that his own moral
sense and self-respect might be outraged, or that the face of his wife
might be crimsoned and the minds of his children befouled. But there
came from out of the West new men and new forces, quick to see the
larger opportunity opened in the very center of five millions of
people, and almost in a night came the metamorphosis of the old World
into the new.
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