is perfectly clear against the prisoner, the
"yellow" press seeks to bolster up the defence and really to justify
the killing by a thinly disguised appeal to the readers' passions. Not
infrequently, while the editorial page is mourning the prevalence of
homicide, the front columns are bristling with sensational accounts of
the home-coming of the injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of
the weak and erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer,
until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly deprecates
the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows that it would have
done the same thing in the prisoner's place.

This antecedent public sentiment is fostered from day to day until it
has unconsciously permeated every corner of the community. The juryman
will swear that he is unaffected by what he has read, but unknown to
himself there are already tiny furrows in his brain along which the
appeal of the defence will run.

In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the
euphemisms of a hard-put defendant's counsel when he pictures a chorus
girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St. George seem innocent
indeed. It is not within the rail of the courtroom but within the pages
of these sensational journals that justice is made a farce. The phrase
"contempt of court" has ceased practically to have any significance
whatever. The front pages teem with caricatures of the judge upon the
bench, of the individual jurors with exaggerated heads upon impossible
bodies, of the lawyers ranting and bellowing, juxtaposed with sketches
of the defendant praying beside his prison cot or firing the fatal shot
in obedience to a message borne by an angel from on high.

How long would the "unwritten law" play any part in the administration
of criminal justice if every paper in the land united in demanding, not
only in its editorials, but upon its front pages, that private vengeance
must cease? Let the "yellow" newspapers confine themselves simply to
an accurate report of the evidence at the trial, with a reiterated
insistence that the law must take its course. Let them stop pandering
to those morbid tastes which they have themselves created. Let the
"Sympathy Sisters," the photographer, and the special artist be excluded
from the court-room. When these things are done, we shall have the same
high standard of efficiency upon the part of the jury in great murder
trials that we have in other cases.