ies into the face of everything decent and holy. And their work
will be seen in the crime and debauchery and the hell of innumerable
victims. Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the
tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.

God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed
sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe
will cry out for their damnation. See the work of bad newspapers
in the false tidings they bring! There are hundreds of men to-day
penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent
positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the
money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these
honest men into the mire. And many a window was hoisted at the hour of
midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra! Extra!" And the father and mother
who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched
cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred.
God pity the father and mother who have a boy at the front when evil
tidings come! If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty
persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that
wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand
falsehoods.

The most stupendous of all lies is a newspaper lie.

A bad newspaper scruples not at any slander. It may be that, to escape
the grip of the law, the paragraphs will be nicely worded, so that the
suspicion is thrown out and the damage done without any exposure to
the law. Year by year, thousands of men are crushed by the ink-roller.
An unscrupulous man in the editorial chair may smite as with the
wing of a destroying angel. What to him is commercial integrity, or
professional reputation, or woman's honor, or home's sanctity? It
seems as if he held in his hand a hose with which, while all the
harpies of sin were working at the pumps, he splashed the waters of
death upon the best interests of society.

The express-train in England halts not to take in water, but between
the tracks there is a trough, one-fourth of a mile in length, filled
with water; and the engine drops a hose that catches up the water
while the train flies. So with bad newspapers that fly along the track
of death without pausing a moment, yet scooping up into themselves the
pollution of society, and in the awful rush making the earth tremble.

The most abandoned man of the city may go to the