 The American Newspaper This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The American Newspaper by Charles Dudley Warner. Our theme for the hour is the American Newspaper. It is a subject in which everybody is interested and about which it is not polite to say that anybody is not well informed. For, although there are scattered through the land many persons, I am sorry to say, unable to pay for a newspaper, I have never yet heard of anybody unable to edit one. The topic has many points of view and invites various study and comment. In our limited time we must select one only. We have heard a great deal about the power, the opportunity, the duty, the mission of the press. The time has come for a more philosophical treatment of it, for an inquiry into its relations to our complex civilization, for some ethical account of it is one of the developments of our day, and for some discussion of the effect it is producing and likely to produce on the education of the people. Has the time come, or is it near at hand, when we can point to a person who is alert, superficial, ready and shallow, self-confident and half-informed and say, there is a product of the American newspaper. The newspaper is not a willful creation, nor an isolated phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age as much as our system of popular education. And I trust that some competent observer will make, perhaps for this association, a philosophical study of it. My task here is a much humbler one. I have thought that it may not be unprofitable to treat the newspaper from a practical and even somewhat mechanical point of view. The newspaper is a private enterprise. Its object is to make money for its owner. Whatever motive may be given out for starting a newspaper, expectation of profit by it is the real one, whether the newspaper is religious, political, scientific or literary. The exceptional cases of newspapers devoted to ideas or causes without regard to profit are so few as not to affect the rule. Commonly, the cause, the sect, the party, the trade, the delusion, the idea gets its newspaper, its organ, its advocate, only when some individual thinks he can see a pecuniary return in establishing it. This motive is not lower than that which leads people into any other occupation or profession. To make a living and to have a career is the original incentive in all cases. Even in purely philanthropical enterprises, the driving wheel that keeps them in motion for any length of time is the salary paid the working members. So powerful is this incentive that sometimes the wheel will continue to turn round when there is no grist to grind. It sometimes happens that the friction of the philanthropic machinery is so great that but very little power is transmitted to the object for which the machinery was made. I knew a devoted agent of the American Colonization Society, who for several years collected in Connecticut just enough for the cause to buy his clothes and pay his board at a good hotel. It is scarcely necessary to say, except to prevent a possible misapprehension, that the editor who has no high ideals, no intention of benefiting his fellow men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously as a means of money making only, sinks to the level of the position in the lawyer, who have no higher conception of their callings, than that they offer opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity and by assisting in evasions of the law. If the excellence of a newspaper is not always measured by its profitableness, it is generally true that if it does not pay its owner, it is valueless to the public. Not all newspapers which make money are good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable people and to the prejudice, ignorance and passion of the lowest class. But as a rule, the successful journal Pecuniarily is the best journal. The reasons for this are on the surface. The Pecuniist newspaper cannot give its readers promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news, and still worse, it cannot be independent. The political journal that relies for support upon drippings of party favor or patronage, the general newspaper that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate stock reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious support from puffing doubtful enterprises, the literary paper that depends upon the approval of publishers, our poor affairs, and in the long run or short run come to grief. Some newspapers do succeed by sensationalism, as some preachers do, by a kind of quackery, as some doctors do, by trimming and shifting to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians do, by becoming the paid advocate of a personal ambition or a corporate enterprise, as some lawyers do, but the newspaper only becomes a real power when it is able on the basis of pecuniary independence to free itself from all such entanglements. An editor who stands with hat in hand has the respect accorded to any other beggar. The recognition of the fact that the newspaper is a private and purely business enterprise will help to define the mutual relations of the editor and the public. His claim upon the public is exactly that of any manufacturer or dealer. It is that of the man who makes cloth, or the grocer who opens a shop. Neither has a right to complain if the public does not buy of him. If the buyer does not like a cloth half shoddy, or coffee half chicory, he will go elsewhere. If the subscriber does not like one newspaper, he takes another, or none. The appeal for newspaper support on the ground that such a journal ought to be sustained by an enlightened community, or on any other ground than that it is a good article that people want, or would want if they knew its value, is purely childish in this age of the world. If any person wants to start a periodical devoted to decorated teapots, with a noble view of inducing the people to live up to his idea of a teapot, very good, but he has no right to complain if he fails. On the other hand, the public has no rights in the newspaper except what it pays for. Even the old subscriber has none except to drop the paper if it seizes to please him. The notion that the subscriber has a right to interfere in the conduct of the paper, or the reader to direct its opinions, is based on a misconception of what the newspaper is. The claim of the public to have its communications printed in the paper is equally baseless, whether they shall be printed or not rests in the discretion of the editor, having reference to his own private interest and to his apprehension of the public good, nor is he bound to give any reason for his refusal. It is purely in his discretion whether he will admit a reply to anything that has appeared in his columns. No one has a right to demand it. Courtesy and policy may grant it, but the right to it does not exist. If anyone is injured, he may seek his remedy at law, and I should like to see the law of libel such and so administered that any person injured by a libel in the newspaper, as well as by slander out of it, could be sure of prompt redress. While the subscriber acquires no right to dictate to the newspaper, we can imagine an extreme case when he should have his money back which had been paid in advance if the newspaper totally changed its character. If he had contracted with a dealer to supply him with hard coal during the winter, he might have a remedy if the dealer delivered only charcoal in the coldest weather, and so if he paid for a Roman Catholic journal which suddenly became an organ of the Spiritus. The advertiser acquires no more rights in the newspaper than the subscriber. He is entitled to use the space for which he pays by the insertion of such material as is approved by the editor. He gains no interest in any other part of the paper and has no more claim to any space in the editorial columns than any other one of the public. To give him such space would be un-business-like and the extension of a preference which would be unjust to the rest of the public. Nothing more quickly destroys the character of a journal, begets distrust of it and so reduces its value, then the well-founded suspicion that its editorial columns are the property of advertisers. Even a religious journal will, after a while, be injured by this. Yet it must be confessed that here is one of the greatest difficulties of modern journalism. The newspaper must be cheap. It is, considering the immense cost to produce it, the cheapest product ever offered to man. Most newspapers cost more than they sell for. They could not live by subscriptions. For any profits, they certainly depend upon advertisements. The advertisements depend upon the circulation. The circulation is likely to dwindle if too much space is occupied by advertisements. Or if it is evident that the paper belongs to its favorite advertisers. The counting room desires to conciliate the advertisers. The editor looks to making a paper satisfactory to his readers. Between this seesaw of the necessary subscriber and the necessary advertiser, a good many newspapers go down. This difficulty would be measurably removed by the admission of the truth that the newspaper is a strictly business enterprise, depending for success upon a quid pro quo between all parties connected with it and upon integrity in its management. Akin to the false notion that the newspaper is a sort of open channel that the public may use as it chooses, is the conception of it as a charitable institution. The newspaper, which is the property of a private person as much as a drug shop is, is expected to perform for nothing services which would be asked of no other private person. There is scarcely a charitable enterprise to which it is not asked to contribute of its space, which is money, ten times more than other persons in the community, who are ten times as able as the owner of the newspaper, contribute. The journal is considered mean if it will not surrender its columns freely to notices and announcements of this sort. If a manager has a new hen coop or a new singer he wishes to introduce to the public, he comes to the newspaper expecting to have his enterprise extolled for nothing and probably never thinks that it would be just as proper for him to go to one of the regular advertisers in the paper and ask him to give up his space. Anything from a church picnic to a brass band concert for the benefit of the widow of the triangles, ask the newspaper to contribute. The party in politics, whose principles the editor advocates, has no doubt of its rightful claim upon him, not only upon the editorial columns, but upon the whole newspaper. It asks without hesitation that the newspaper should take up its valuable space by printing hundreds and often thousands of dollars worth of political announcements in the course of a protracted campaign when it never would think of getting its halls, its speakers, and its brass bands free of expense. Churches as well as parties expect this sort of charity. I have known rich churches to whose members it was a convenience to have their Sunday and other services announced, withdraw the announcements when the editor declined any longer to contribute a weekly fifty cents worth of space. No, private persons contribute so much to charity in proportion to ability as the newspaper. Perhaps it will get credit for this in the next world. It certainly never does in this. The chief function of the newspaper is to collect and print the news. Upon the kind of news that should be gathered and published, we shall remark farther on. The second function is to elucidate the news and comment on it and show its relations. A third function is to furnish reading matter to the general public. Nothing is so difficult for the manager as to know what news is. The instinct for it is a sort of sixth sense. To discern out of the mass of materials collected not only what is most likely to interest the public, but what phase and aspect of it will attract most attention and the relative importance of it. To tell the day before or at midnight what the world will be talking about in the morning and what it will want the fullest details of, and to meet that want in advance, requires a peculiar talent. There is always some topic on which the public wants instant information. It is easy enough when the news is developed and everybody is discussing it for the editor to fall in. But the success of the news printed depends upon a pre-apprehension of all this. Some papers, which nevertheless print all the news, are always a day behind. Do not appreciate the popular drift till it has gone to something else, and air as much by clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not taking it up before it was fairly born. The public craves eagerly for only one thing at a time, and soon worries of that, and it is to the newspaper's profit to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse, to throw itself into it as if life depended on it, and for the hour to flood the popular curiosity with it as an engine deluges a fire. Scarcely less important than probably seizing and printing the news is the attractive arrangement of it. It's effective presentation to the eye. Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence, identically the same dispatches. The one will be called bright, attractive, newsy, the other dull and stupid. We have said nothing yet about that which to most people is the most important aspect of the newspaper, the editor's responsibility to the public for its contents. It is sufficient briefly to say here that it is exactly the responsibility of every other person in society, the full responsibility of his opportunity. He has voluntarily taken a position in which he can do a great deal of good, or a great deal of evil, and he should be held and judged by his opportunity. It is greater than that of the preacher, the teacher, the congressman, the physician. He occupies the loftiest pulpit. He is in his teacher's desk seven days a week. His voice can be heard farther than that of the most lusty foghorn politician. And often I am sorry to say his columns outshine the shells of the druggist in display of proprietary medicines. Nothing else ever invented has the public attention as the newspaper has, or is an influence so constant and universal. It is this large opportunity that has given the impression that the newspaper is a public rather than a private enterprise. It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and variable to be credited with a balanced wheel of sense. But it must have something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the other, or it will fail to please. The model editor, I believe, has yet to appear. Notwithstanding the traditional reputation of certain editors in the past, they could not be called great editors by our standards, for the elements of modern journalism did not exist in their time. The old newspaper was a broad side of stale news with a moral essay attached. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin, with our facilities, would have been very near the ideal editor. There was nothing he did not wish to know, and no one excelled him in the ability to communicate what he found out to the average mind. He came as near as anybody ever did to marrying common sense to literature. He had it in him to make it sufficient for journalistic purposes. He was what somebody said Carlisle was, and what the American editor ought to be, a vernacular man. The assertion has been made recently, publicly, and with evidence adduced, that the American newspaper is the best in the world. It is like the assertion that the American government is the best in the world. No doubt it is for the American people. Judged by broad standards, it may safely be admitted that the American newspaper is susceptible to some improvement, and that it has something to learn from the journals of other nations. We shall be better employed in correcting its weaknesses than in complacently contemplating its excellences. Let us examine it in its three departments already named, its news, editorials, and miscellaneous reading matter. In particularity and comprehensiveness of news collecting, it may be admitted that the American newspapers for a time led the world. I mean in the picking up of local intelligence, and the use of the telegraph to make it general. And with this arose the odd notion that news is made important by the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire. The English journals followed, speedily overtook, and some wealthier ones perhaps surpassed the American in the use of the telegraph, and in the presentation of some sorts of local news, not of casualties, and small city and neighborhood events, and social gossip, until very recently. But certainly in the business of the law courts and the crimes and mishaps that come within police and legal supervision. Deleting papers of the German press, though strong in correspondence and in discussion of affairs, are far less comprehensive in their news than the American or the English. The French journals we are accustomed to say are not newspapers at all, and this is true as we use the word. Until recently nothing has been of importance to the Frenchman except himself, and what happened outside of France, not directly affecting his glory, his profit, or his pleasure, did not interest him. Hence one could nowhere so securely entrench himself against the news of the world as behind the barricade of the Paris journals. But let us not make a mistake in this matter. We may have more to learn from the Paris journals than from any others. If they do not give what we call news, local news, events, casualties, the happenings of the day, they do give ideas, opinions. They do discuss politics, the social drift. They give the intellectual firmament of Paris. They supply the material that Paris likes to talk over, the badinage of the boulevard, the wit of the salon, the sensation of the stage, the new movement in literature, and in politics. This may be important or it may be trivial. It is commonly more interesting than much of that which we call news. Our very facility and enterprise in news gathering have overwhelmed our newspapers, and it may be remarked that editorial discrimination has not kept pace with the facilities. We are overpowered with a mass of undigested intelligence, collected for the most part without regard to value. The force of the newspaper is expended in extending these facilities with little regard to discriminating selection. The burden is already too heavy for the newspaper, and we're assigned to the public. The publication of the news is the most important function of the paper. How is it gathered? We must confess that it is gathered very much by chance. A dragnet is thrown out and whatever comes is taken. An examination into the process of collecting shows what sort of news we are likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed is collected without much intelligence, and is exercised in selection. The alliance of the Associated Press with the Telegraph Company is a fruitful source of news of an inferior quality. Of course, it is for the interest of the Telegraph Company to swell the volume to be transmitted. It is impossible for the Associated Press to have an agent in every place to which the Telegraph penetrates. Therefore, the Telegraphic operators often act as its purveyors. It is for their interest to send something, and their judgment of what is important is not only biased, but is borne by purely local standards. Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by Telegraphic operators. By agents trained to regard only the accidental, the startling, the abnormal, as news. It is picked up by sharp prowlers about town, whose pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for something spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who regard casualties as the chief news. Our newspapers every day are loaded with accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people of whom we never heard before and never shall hear again, the reading of which is of no earthly use to any human being. What is news? What is it that an intelligent public should care to hear of and talk about? Run your eye down the columns of your journal. There was a drunken squabble last night in a New York robbery. There is a petty but carefully elaborated village scandal about a foolish girl. A woman accidentally dropped her baby out of a four-story window in Maine. In Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same rail-rate train as another woman's husband. A child fell into a well in New Jersey. There is a column about a parapetetic horse race, which exhibits, like a circus, from city to city. A laborer in a remote town in Pennsylvania had a sunstroke. There is an edifying, dying speech of a murderer, the love letter of a suicide, the set to of a couple of congressmen, and there are columns about a gigantic war of half a dozen politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gager. Granted that this pablum is desired by the reader, why not save the expense of transmission by having several columns of it stereotyped to be reproduced at proper intervals? With the date changed, it would always have its original value and perfectly satisfy the demand, if a demand exists for this sort of news. This is not, as you see, a description of your journal. It is a description of only one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful creation. Every morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less distorted and imperfect, but such a mirror as it never had held up to it before. But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the name of news. And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life. A horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed. But the progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahhabi revival in Islam, which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires. We hear promptly of a landslide in Switzerland, but only very slowly of a political agitation that is changing the constitution of the Republic. It should be said, however, that the daily newspaper is not alone responsible for this. It is what the age and the community where it is published make it. So far as I have observed, the majority of the readers in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance at a column report of a debate in the English Parliament, which involves a radical change in the whole policy of England, and devours a page about the Chantilly Races while it ignores a paragraph concerning the suppression of the Jesuit schools. Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance. The obvious remedy for this would be more intelligent direction in the collection of news and more careful sifting and supervision of it when gathered. It becomes every day more apparent to every manager that such discrimination is more necessary. There is no limit to the various intelligence and gossip that our complex life offers. No paper is big enough to contain it. No reader has time enough to read it. And the journal must cease to be a sort of wastebasket at the end of a telegraph wire, into which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossipmonger can dump whatever he pleases. We must get rid of the superstition that value is given to an unimportant item by sending it a thousand miles over a wire. Perhaps the most striking feature of the American newspaper, especially of the country weekly, is its enormous development of local and neighborhood news. It is of recent date. Horace Greeley used to advise the country editors to give small space to the general news of the world, but to cultivate assiduously the home field, to glean every possible detail of private life in the circuit of the county, and print it. The advice was shrewd for a metropolitan editor, and it was not without its profit to the country editor. It was founded upon a deep knowledge of human nature, namely upon the fact that people read most eagerly that which they already know. If it is about themselves or their neighbors, if it is a report of something they have been concerned in, a lecture they have heard, a fair, or festival, or wedding, or funeral, or barn-raising they have attended, the result is column after column of short paragraphs of gossip and trivialities. Chips, chips, chips. Mr. Sales is contemplating erecting a new counter in his store. His rival opposite has a new sign. Miss Bumps of Gath is visiting her cousin, Miss Smith of Basra. The sheriff has painted his fence. Farmer Brown has lost his cow. The eminent member from Neopolis has put an L on one end of his mansion and a mortgage on the other. On the face of it nothing is so vapid and profitless as column after column of this reading. These items have very little interest except to those who already know the facts. But those concerned like to see them in print and take the newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity takes the place of reading matter that might be of benefit and its effect must be to belittle and contract the mind. But this is not the most serious objection to the publication of these worthless details. It cultivates self-consciousness in the community and love of notoriety. It develops vanity and self-importance and elevates the trivial in life above the essential. And this brings me to speak of the mania in this age and especially in America for notoriety and social life as well as in politics. The newspapers are the vehicle of it, sometimes the occasion but not the cause. The newspaper may have fostered it has not created this hunger for publicity. Almost everybody talks about the violation of decency and the sanctity of private life by the newspaper in the publication of personalities and the gossip of society. And the very people who make these strictures are often those who regard the paper as without enterprise and doll if it does not report in detail their weddings, their balls and parties, the distinguished persons present, the dress of the ladies, the sumptuousness of the entertainment if it does not celebrate their church services and festivities, their social meetings, their new house, their distinguished arrivals at this or that watering place. I believe every newspaper manager will bear me out in saying that there is a constant pressure on him to print much more of such private matter than his judgment and taste permit or approve. And that the gossip which is brought to his notice with the hope that he will violate the sensitiveness of social life by printing it is far away larger in amount than all that he publishes. To return for a moment to the subject of general news, the characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world and we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow again. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks, but nevertheless every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness. It might be worthwhile to inquire what affect this exciting accumulation of the news of the world upon an individual or a community has upon happiness and upon character. Is the New England man any better able to bear or deal with his extraordinary climate by the daily knowledge of the weather all over the globe? Is a man happier or improved in character by the woeful tale of a world's distress and apprehension that greets him every morning at breakfast? Knowledge we know increases sorrow, but I suppose the offset to that is that strength only comes through suffering. But this is a digression. Not second in importance to any department of the journal is the reporting. That is, the special reporting is distinguished from the more general news gathering. I mean the reports of proceedings in Congress, in conventions, assemblies and conferences, public conversations, lectures, sermons, investigations, law trials, and occurrences of all sorts that rise to general importance. These reports are the basis of our knowledge and opinions. If they are false or exaggerated, we are ignorant of what is taking place and misled. It is of infinitely more importance that they should be absolutely trustworthy than that the editorial comments should be sound and wise. If the reports on affairs can be depended on, the public can form its own opinion and act intelligently. And if the public has a right to demand anything of a newspaper, it is that its reports of what occurs shall be faithfully accurate, unprejudiced, and colorless. They ought not to be editorials or the vehicles of personal opinion and feeling. The interpretation of the facts they give should be left to the editor and the public. There should be a sharp line drawn between the report and the editorial. I am inclined to think that the reporting department is the weakest in the American newspaper, and that there is just ground for the admitted public distrust of it. Too often if a person would know what has taken place in a given case, he must read the reports in half a dozen journals, then strike a general average of probabilities, allowing for the personal equation, and then suspend his judgment. Of course, there is much excellent reporting, and there are many able men engaged in it who reflect the highest honor upon their occupation. And the press of no other country shows more occasional brilliant feats in reporting than ours. These are on occasions when the newspapers make special efforts. Take the last two national party conventions. The fullness, the accuracy, the vividness with which their proceedings were reported in the leading journals were marvelous triumphs of knowledge, skill, and expense. The conventions were so photographed by hundreds of pins that the public outside saw them almost as distinctly as the crowd in attendance. This result was attained because the editors determined that it should be, sent able men to report, and demanded the best work. The taken opposite and daily illustration of reporting, that of the debates and proceedings in Congress. I do not refer to the specials of various journals which are good, bad, or indifferent as the case may be, and commonly colored by partisan considerations, but the regular synopsis sent to the country at large. Now for some years it has been inadequate, frequently unintelligible, often grossly misleading, failing wholly to give the real spirit and meaning of the most important discussions, and it is as dry as chips besides. To be both stupid and inaccurate is the unpardonable sin in journalism. Contrast these reports with the lively and faithful pictures of the French assembly which are served to the Paris Papers. Before speaking of the reasons for the public distrust in reports, it is proper to put in one qualification. The public itself, and not the newspapers, is the great factory of baseless rumors and untruths. Although the newspaper unavoidably gives currency to some of these, it is the great corrector of popular rumors. Concerning any event, a hundred different versions and conflicting accounts are instantly set afloat. These would run on and become subtle but unfounded beliefs, as private whispered scandals do run, if the newspaper did not intervene. It is the business of the newspaper on every occurrence of moment to chase down the rumors and to find out the facts and print them, and set the public mind at rest. The newspaper publishes them under a sense of responsibility for its statements. It is not by any means always correct, but I know that it is the aim of both newspapers to discharge this important public function faithfully. When this country had few newspapers, it was ten times more the prey of false reports and delusions than it is now. Reporting requires as high ability as editorial writing, perhaps of a different kind, though in the history of American journalism the best reporters have often become the best editors. Talent of this kind must be adequately paid, and it happens that in America the reporting field is so vast that few journals can afford to make the reporting department correspond in ability to the editorial. And I doubt if the importance of doing so is yet fully realized. An intelligent and representative synopsis of a lecture or other public performance is rare. The ability to grasp a speaker's meaning or to follow a long discourse and reproduce either in spirit, and fairly, in a short space, is not common. When the public which has been present reads the inaccurate report, it loses confidence in the newspaper. Its confidence is again undermined when it learns that an interview which it has read with interest was manufactured. That the report of the movements and sayings of a distinguished stranger was a pure piece of ingenious invention. That a thrilling adventure along shore or in a balloon or in a horse car was what is called a sensational article, concocted by some brilliant genius and spun out by the yard according to his necessities. These reports are entertaining and often more readable than anything else in the newspaper. And if they were put into a department with an appropriate heading, the public would be less suspicious that all the news in the journal was colored and heightened by a lively imagination. Intelligent and honest reporting of whatever interests the public is the sound basis of all journalism. And yet so careless have editors been of all this that a reporter has been sent to attend the sessions of a philological convention who had not the least linguistic knowledge, having always been employed on marine disasters. Another reporter who was assigned to inform the public of the results of a difficult archaeological investigation, frankly, confessed his inability to understand what was going on. For his ordinary business, he said, was cattle. A story is told of a metropolitan journal which illustrates another difficulty the public has in keeping up its confidence in newspaper infallibility. It may not be true for history, but answers for an illustration. The annual November meteors were expected on a certain night. The journal prepared an elaborate article, several columns in length, on meteoric displays in general, and on the display of that night in particular, giving in detail the appearance of the heavens from the metropolitan roofs in various parts of the city, the shooting of the meteors amid the blazing constellations, the size and times of flight of the fiery bodies. In short, a most vivid and scientific account of the lofty firework. Unfortunately, the night was cloudy. The article was in type and ready, but the clouds would not break. The last moment for going to press arrived. There was a probability that the clouds would lift before daylight, and the manager took the risk. The article that appeared was very interesting, but its scientific value was impaired by the fact that the heavens were obscured the whole night, and the meteors, if any, arrived were invisible. The reasonable excuse of the editor would be that he could not control the elements. If the reporting department needs strengthening and reduction to order in the American journal, we may also query whether the department of correspondence sustains the buzz that the American newspaper is the best in the world. We have a good deal of excellent correspondence, both foreign and domestic, and our specials have one distinction, at least for lightliness and enterprise. I cannot dwell upon this feature, but I suggest a comparison with the correspondence of some of the German, and with that especially of the London journals, from the various capitals of Europe and from the occasional seats of war. How surpassing able much of it is. How full of information, of philosophic observation, of accurate knowledge. It appears to be written by men of trained intellect and of experience, educated men of the world, who, by reason of their position and character, have access to the highest sources of information. The editorials of our journals seem to me better than formerly, improved in tone, in courtesy, in self-respect, though you may not have to go far or search long for the provincial note and the easy grace of the frontier, and they are better written. This is because the newspaper has become more profitable and is able to pay for talent and has attracted to it educated young men. There is a sort of editorial ability, a facility of force that can only be acquired by practice and in the newspaper office. No school can ever teach it, but the young editor who has a broad basis of general education, of information in history, political economy, the classics and polite literature, has an immense advantage over the man who has merely practical experience. For the editorial, if it is to hold its place, must be more and more the product of information, culture and reflection, as well as of sagacity and alertness, ignorance of foreign affairs and of economic science, the American people have in the past winked at, but they will not always wink at it. It is the belief of some shrewd observers that editorials, the long editorials, are not much read except by editors themselves. A cynic says that if you have a secret you are very anxious to keep from the female portion of the population, the safest place to put it is in an editorial. It seems to me that editorials are not conned as attentively as they once were, and I am sure they have not so much influence as formerly. People are not so easily or so visibly led, that is to say, the editorial influence is not so dogmatic and direct. The editor does not expect to form public opinion so much by arguments and appeals, as by the news he presents and his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an idea until it becomes familiar, by the reading matter selected and by the quotations of opinions as news, and not professedly to influence the reader. And this influence is all the more potent because it is indirect and not perceived by the reader. There is an editorial tradition, it might almost be termed a superstition, which I think will have to be abandoned. It is that a certain space in the journal must be filled with editorial, and that some of the editorials must be long without any reference to the news or the necessity of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at the moment to fill the space with original matter that is readable. There is the sacred space and it must be filled. The London journals are perfect types of this custom. The result is often a weirsome page of words and rhetoric. It may be good rhetoric, but life is too short for so much of it. The necessity of filling the space causes the writer, instead of stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made perspicuous and telling, to beat it out thin and make it cover as much ground as possible. This also is vanity. In the economy of room which our journals will more and more be compelled to cultivate, I venture to say that this tradition will be set aside. I think that we may fairly claim a superiority in our journals over the English dailies in our habit of making brief, pointed editorial paragraphs. They are the life of the editorial page. A cultivation of these until they are as finished and pregnant as the paragraphs of the London spectator and the New York Nation, the printing of long editorials only when the elucidation of a subject demands length, and the use of the space thus saved for more interesting reading is probably the line of our editorial evolution. To continue the comparison of our journals as a class with the English as a class, ours are more lively, also more flippant and less restrained by a sense of responsibility or by the laws of libel. We furnish now and again as good editorial writing for its purpose, but it commonly lacks the dignity, the thoroughness, the wide sweep and knowledge that characterizes the best English discussion of political and social topics. The third department of the newspaper is that of miscellaneous reading matter, whether this is the survival of the period when the paper contains little else except selections and other printed matter was scarce, or whether it is only the beginning of a development that shall supply the public nearly all its literature, I do not know. Far as our newspapers have already gone in this direction, I am inclined to think that in their evolution they must drop this adjunct and print simply the news of the day. Some of the leading journals of the world already do this. In America I am sure the papers are printing too much miscellaneous reading. The perusal of this smattering of everything, these scraps of information and snatches of literature, this infinite variety and medley in which no subject is adequately treated, is distracting and debilitating to the mind. It prevents the reading of anything in full and its satisfactory assimilation. It is said that the majority of Americans read nothing except the paper. If they read that thoroughly they have time for nothing else. What is its reader to do when his journal thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in a fair size dual decimal volume and on Sundays the amount of two of them? Granted that this miscellaneous hodgepodge is the cream of current literature, is it profitable to the reader? Is it a means of anything but superficial culture and fragmentary information? Besides it stimulates an unnatural appetite, a liking for the striking, the brilliant, the sensational only. For our selections from current literature are usually the plums, and plums are not a wholesome diet for anybody. A person accustomed to this finds it difficult to sit down patiently to the mastery of a book or a subject, to the study of history, the perusal of extended biography, or to acquire that intellectual development and strength which comes from thorough reading and reflection. The subject has another aspect. Nobody chooses his own reading, and a whole community perusing substantially the same material tends to a mental uniformity. The editor has the more than royal power of selecting the intellectual food of a large public. It is a responsibility infinitely greater than that of the compiler of school books, great as that is. The taste of the editor, or of some assistant who uses the scissors, is in a manner forced upon thousands of people who see little other printed manner than that which he gives them. Suppose his taste runs to murders and abnormal crimes and to the sensational in literature. What will be the moral effect upon a community of reading this year after year? If this excess of daily miscellany is deleterious to the public, I doubt if it will be in the long run profitable to the newspaper, which has a field broad enough in reporting and commenting upon the movement of the world without attempting to absorb the whole reading field. I should like to say a word, if time permitted, upon the form of the journal and about advertisements. I look to see advertisements shorter, printed with less display and more numerous. In addition to the use now made of the newspaper by the classes called advertisers, I expect it to become the handy medium of the entire public, the means of ready communication in regard to all wants and exchanges. Several years ago the attention of the publishers of American newspapers was called to the convenient form of certain daily journals in South Germany, which were made up in small pages, the number of which varied from day to day, according to the pressure of news or of advertisements. The suggestion as to form has been adopted by many of our religious, literary and special weeklies to the great convenience of the readers, and I doubt not of the publishers also. Nothing is more unwieldly than our big blanket sheets. They are awkward to handle, inconvenient to read, unhandy to bind and preserve. It is difficult to classify matter in them. In dull seasons they are too large. In times of brisk advertising and in the sudden access of important news they are too small. To enlarge them for the occasion, resort is had to a troublesome fly sheet, or, if they are doubled, there is more space to be filled than is needed. It seems to me that the inevitable remedy is a newspaper of small pages or forms, indefinite in number, that can at any hour be increased or diminished according to necessity, to be folded, stitched and cut by machinery. We have thus rapidly run over a prolific field, touching only upon some of the relations of the newspaper to our civilization, and omitting many of the more important engrave. The truth is that the development of the modern journal has been so sudden and marvelous that its conductors find themselves in possession of a machine that they scarcely know how to manage or direct. The change in the newspaper caused by the telegraph, the cable, and by a public demand for news created by wars, by discoveries, and by a new outburst of the spirit of doubt and inquiry, is enormous. The public mind is confused about it, and alternately overestimates and underestimates the press, failing to see how integral and representative a part it is of modern life. The power of the press as something to be feared or admired is a favorite theme of dinner table orators and clergymen. One would think it was some compactly wielded energy, like that of an organized religious order with a possible danger in it to the public welfare. Discrimination is not made between the power of the printed word, which is limitless, and the influence that a newspaper as such exerts. The power of the press is in its facility for making public opinions and events. I should say it is a medium of force rather than force itself. I confess that I am often are impressed with the powerlessness of the press than otherwise. It slight influence in bringing about any reform, or in inducing the public to do what is for its own good, and what it is disinclined to do. Talk about the power of the press say in a legislature, when once the members are suspicious that somebody is trying to influence them, and see how the press will retire, with what grace it can, before an invincible and virtuous lobby. The fear of the combination of the press for any improper purpose, or long for any proper purpose, is chimerical. Whomever the newspapers agree with, they do not agree with each other. The public itself never takes so many conflicting views of any topic, or event, as the ingenious rival journals are certain to discover. It is impossible in their nature for them to combine. I should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man, that does not get somewhere in the press, a hearer, and a defender. We will drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom it may concern. With all its faults, I believe the moral tone of the American newspaper is higher, as a rule, than that of the community in which it is published. End of The American Newspaper by Charles Dudley Warner. Apples for the Table by Ms. Gertrude Coburn, Professor of Domestic Economy, Iowa Agricultural College, Ames, Iowa. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Balauna Times. Apples for the Table by Ms. Gertrude Coburn. Chemical analysis of apples, fairly representing the average composition, indicates that the total nutriment is about 15% of the whole weight, and consists principally of sugar, organic acid, and pectin, which gelatinizes when boiled and cooled. Although the fruit is thus shown to be, but slightly, nutritious, is generally palatable and wholesome. It easily supplies variety in diet throughout the year, and it has the advantage of being suitable for any meal and combining agreeably with many other common food materials. When ripe and carefully selected, the uncooked apple is toothsome and healthful, either alone and between meals, or as one of the table fruits. The indigestible skin and cellulose with the water and acid contribute to the dietetic value in that they make the whole raw apple a laxative food, especially effective when eaten before breakfast or at night. Cooked entire, and without any addition, the well-flavored apple is among the most perfect and economical of the sub-acid fruits for everyday use, and for the invalid's tray is seldom surpassed. Baked in its own juice with sugar and additional flavoring, or boiled in syrup, it is relished equally with the breakfast mush, the dinner meat, and the supper bread and cake. Combined with cream, custard, whipped white of egg, or tapioca, which add nutriment without destroying the fruit flavor, it affords a delicate dessert inexpensive and easily prepared. Stamed or baked with a light covering or crust of biscuit dough or pastry, it has a variety of forms, all used for dinner and usually made complete with sweetened cream or in other cases with a bit of good cheese. The skin, while not digestible, is not often injurious and as the best flavor is contained in the surface portion of the skin, careless pairing is wasteful and unnecessary, especially when the fruit is to be baked. The unbroken envelope retains the steam produced as the juice is heated, thus hastening the process of expanding and bursting the tiny cells and converting the firm pulp into a delicate sauce. This suggests that, in order to produce the desirable lightness, the oven should be sufficiently hot to change the water of the fruit into steam. If the skin is tough or for other reasons is removed, the clean, unblemished pairings with the cores may be simmered in water until the flavor and color make it a useful addition for pudding sauce, preserves, or jelly. It is usually best to remove the core before cooking and when the apple, as for compote, is not to be otherwise cut after pairing, it should be coared before the skin is taken off to prevent breaking. The various forms of boiled and steamed apples are attractive and generally light. The requisites are to select good fruit and wash it clean before cutting to remove only a thin pairing, all of the core and the bruised, discolored and defective parts to intensify rather than obscure the apple flavor, using only enough of sugar, spice, or lemon when any is needed to accomplish this purpose. To use granite or porcelain lined utensils, avoiding even 10 covers or silver or wooden spoons, to retain by slow cooking and careful handling the perfect form of the fruit or else to produce by stirring and straining a light, lumpless sauce. To serve the apple preparation with the same respectful and dainty care that is usually bestowed upon the rarer but not more worthy, pineapple and orange. In the summer and autumn, when the fruit is at its best, no additional flavor is needed. Towards spring, when it becomes less palatable, the deficiency may be best supplied with a little lemon juice and grated rind, a bit of pineapple or quince, a few drops of almond extract or rose water, or a few whole cloves. Sweet apples, which are dry and rather tasteless, may be utilized satisfactorily if stewed, canned, or preserved with one third their bulk of quince. End of apples for the table by Miss Gertrude Coburn. As ye sow by Leo B. Hart. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Bologna Times. As ye sow by Leo B. Hart, Superintendent of Schools, Kern County. From Guiding Children in Democratic Living, 1942. California Elementary School Principles Association, Vol. 14. Out of the East came a mighty flood of Americans' children. Tired, hungry, ill-clad children, products of the drought that drove their parents from the dusty plains westward over mountain and desert to California in search of a land that would give life and opportunity to them and their little ones. Endless days and weeks were spent sleeping on ditch-banks huddled around campfires, shoved into filthy sheds that reeked with musty odors and the stench of decaying foodstuffs and unsanitary waste. Weeks of labor in the boiling sun, hot, sultry, sleepless nights, only to await the dawn, then into the fields with droves of their kind. Thus the migrants moved about, the valley, unwelcome and unwanted, but their labors were needed for every crop. Like a wandering tribe they roamed from camp to camp, from harvest to harvest, with the seasons. District schools everywhere were crowded. Special rooms, old condemned buildings, long out of use, were hurriedly put in shape for the migrants. Old desks were dragged from garret and storeroom for the newcomers, new desks for the local children. Over and over the same scene until it became the commonplace thing to see the pale, drawn faces, the dirty hands, the scraggly, uncombed hair and the ill-fitting and worn-out clothes. Little feet were tough and brown and dirty and accustomed to the frosty earth that bit and stung. After months of lost schooling, months of humiliation and embarrassment for a band of helpless youngsters, great camps were built throughout the valley. Rent was cheap, accommodations were clean and wholesome. There was a chance to live again like human beings. Utility buildings provided washing machines, ironing boards, toilets and showers. There was running hot and cold water for everyone. The recreation hall provided a meeting place for the camp folks, a half for plays and dances and every kind of wholesome entertainment and a place to worship. The management of the camps was friendly, courteous and helpful. Words of encouragement and help in finding work gave these wanderers a lift when sadly needed. The cooperative store supplied the wants of the campers at a minimum cost. From such a camp, our Arvin Federal School draws its 175 students as fine a group of boys and girls as you can find in any of our public schools, courteous, friendly, polite, happy children. They are proud of their school for the opportunities it gives them, for the atmosphere of hopefulness, of cleanliness and love that emanates from every classroom and erects every activity. Their seven teachers are of the chosen few, a selected group of especially trained and temperamentally adapted to the work they have to do. They are specialists in educational fields of instruction, essential to a complete and practical preparation for an active and productive life. In this school, manners, morals, etiquette and health are major objectives. The trades and vocations, too, receive their full share of the students' time and attention. Music, dramatics, corrective speech and speech arts, sewing, cooking, weaving, painting, clay, woodworking, carpentering, plumbing, electrical wiring, farming, recreation and counseling are activities that make up the daily routine. Every classroom is a workshop and each are tools for all of the manual arts, saws, hammers, screwdrivers, braces and beds, rules, squares and chisels. As we enter the room, a group of youngsters is seated on a semi-circle around the teacher. She looks up and nods and smiles and goes on with her work. A couple of youngsters leave their desks, greet us with a welcoming smile and bring us chairs. Groups of children, all apparently of the same age, are working on different activities. Some are cutting pigs, chickens, cows, horses and sheep out of three-ply to take their places in the barnyard already fenced in the area at the front of the room. The house, silo, barn and machine sheds are all in place giving a very definite impression that this is a unit on rural life. Some of the youngsters are making clay models of animals, trees and trinkets. Some are painting and others are busy writing stories which we learn have to do with this dairy project. The walls are lined with poster boards on which pictures tell the story of the dairy business. There seems to be great interest here and everything is orderly and business-like. The atmosphere gives one the sense of freedom of action with a definiteness of purpose. These rooms now light, airy and spacious. With worlds of cabinet and cupboard space provide a cheery environment. The long work bench with sink, faucet and drinking fountain are features of each of the seven temporary frame buildings that house this emergency school. The doctor and nurse from the public health department of the county have given each child a complete physical examination and have received the full cooperation of the mothers who came from the camp to be present to get instructions on the care of their little ones. So many of whom are suffering the penalties of malnutrition and neglect. In the health room, with its full cello-glass front making it light and warm, a dozen cots are utilized throughout the day in order that a hundred children may receive the period of rest so sorely needed. A temporary classroom has been converted into a lovely and attractive cafeteria where a hot breakfast and lunch is available to every child for a maximum charge of three cents. The food supply is provided by the surplus commodities and augmented by the donations of a group of public-spirited young women in a Southern California city who visit the camp frequently and believe in the value of the work being done. The three cooks are provided by the WPA. The kitchen is roomy and equipped with a fine new stove, electric refrigerator, a plentiful supply of cooking utensils, dishes, and cupboard space. It is unique in that it was once just empty space that separated two of the classroom buildings, but by utilizing adobe walls in front and rear, a wood floor, and a roof and ceiling, this waste space became an efficiently arranged kitchen from whence meals are served through openings cut in the end of the classroom that is now the cafeteria, such as the ingenuity of those charged with the running of this novel school. The boys enjoy farm life in the open. With a new garden tractor, they plowed and prepared two acres of ground for the planting of potatoes, a crop which will net them a nice return and fill the coffers of their cafeteria fund. Fruit trees and berry bushes are being planted. Harvest will follow harvest, and with good luck the labors of these young migrant lads will not only bring them a knowledge of farming in this valley, but will point the way to better living for them as they leave to make their way after graduation. A grove of shade trees and decorative shrubs is in its second year of growth. This provides a laboratory and horticulture and landscaping, and these migrant boys will soon be adding a touch of beauty to outlying district school yards through a free landscape service. They contemplate with pleasure and no small degree of pride. Two box cars and a lean-to annex are being converted into a five-room cottage, which is to be the center of home-making activities for the girls. One maintenance man works steadily on the job, assisted every afternoon for two hours by a group of boys from the shop classes. This project provides the boys with training in electric wiring, plumbing, and carpentering, while the girls share in planning, designing, decorating, and furnishing. The cottage, with its living-room, bedroom, bath, dining-room, and kitchen, fills a real need in the all-important business of teaching the art of home-making and management to these young people. Youngsters who come to the school are not always ready for polite society, but it takes but a few days for them to catch the spirit that pervades the school. Last year the teacher's registers showed a total enrollment of 145 pupils per teacher. Classes vary from 20 to 40 during the years with a growing tendency on the part of parents to become permanent residents of the camp. The children are happy here. They want to stay, and we want them to stay, for we like them. There is no group in the country that is happier, more appreciative, or more polite than these boys and girls at Arvin Federal School. Discipline cases are rare. Property and individual rights are respected. Teachers and pupils here are sharing in a truly wonderful experience in democratic living. End of, as ye so, by Leo B. Hart. The Catacombs of Paris by Neil Wynne-Williams. This is a LibriVox recording. Only LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nathine Godpoulet. The Catacombs of Paris by Neil Wynne-Williams. To some people it will come as a surprise to hear that there are catacombs at Paris. The fame of the similar collection of human remains at Rome would appear to have dwarfed out of sight the wondrous quarries that stretch beneath the greater portion of southern Paris. Nevertheless, the catacombs of the French capital are a wonderful and a weird sight and one that is open to any member of the public who makes a written application to Monsieur le préfet de la scène. Their historical origin is interesting and aptly exemplifies the changes that time brings in its strain. From a remote past down to the 17th century there were merely quarries when stone was drawn and drawn to keep pace with the growth of the city above them. The natural consequence of this strain upon the vitals of the city's support was a subsidence in 1774 which, by damaging property and bringing about numerous accidents informed the public that someone must do something or that nobody would be left to do anything. In 1777 a still stronger hint from below aroused the government to an activity which expanded its energy in supporting with pierces and buttresses the most dangerous portions of the affected area. These works, continued from year to year, proved a fertile source of expense. In 1784 the question arose as to the disposal of the relics of mortality which were to be removed from the disused cemetery of the innocents. It was suggested that the quarries should be still further strengthened and rendered compact by their adoption as catacombs. The suggestion met with approval was adopted and the transfer of the vast accumulation of bones entered upon with all due precautions. It was thus that the quarries became the garner room of the destroyer. It was thus, as the various cemeteries within the CDCs to yarn for their dead that they were made to yield up their silent tenants. In 1786 the catacombs were solemnly consecrated. At this period the bones and skulls were being cast down on the floors of the caverns and passages in great heaps without any attempt at order or arrangement. Nor was it till the year 1812 that the authorities commenced the work which has culminated in the present artistic presentment of that which once formed the framework of living thousands. Come, we will descend together as two members of the public and see a portion of this underground and silent world that extends its ramifications beneath 200 acres of Paris. We are in possession of our permits and, according to direction, find ourselves at the principal entrance on the right of the Place d'Enfer Rocheraux. We take our places in the queue of those about to descend. We buy candles. An obliging stranger tears off a square piece from a newspaper and hands it to us with a polite bow. The careful, courteous man. He explains to us that presently it will be useful if only les messieurs will adopt this plan of catching the droppings of a flickering candle held in the bare hand and so saying he triumphantly thrusts his candle with a ripping, tearing noise through the paper. The idea is good, so good that it travels along the queue and each candle soon boasts a paper guard. One o'clock strikes. The door guarding the entrance to 90 steps that lead to below swings open. Its harsh grating is the signal for a brisk fusillade of much firing reports. The matches are applied to the candles. A strong odder of tallow seethes through the mellow sunshine and through its sickly fumes we commence to slowly advance. Already the leading file has vanished within the doorway and as we in turn approach the orifice a dull roar pours suddenly out to meet us. Tramp, tramp, tramp. We have passed beneath the archway. We are descending the spiral of the stone staircase. The air is heavy with the clanger of ponderous footfalls, murky with candle smoke that vase with weird effect the flickering drood-driven light. As far and just so far as we can see above and below us all is in movement. Dresses, coats, candles well slowly, and certainly downward. The very walls seem to thrive in the uncertain light to mutter and to moan with inarticulate voices. Down, down, down. All are in the rug-home of death. A moment's pause a silent falls on the chattering crowd. Then a frighted with a second sphere they sway onward through a rocky gallery. Rock on either side of them, rock above them. Here bare and arid they are slimy with oozing water and foul growth. The passage broadens out, it narrows, and ever and ever there is the black line on the roof that marks the road. Suddenly a black shadow on the left or to the right. The eye plunges into the depth of these side roads and recoils aghast at their mysterious gloom. The lights file on. A thin glitter seems a dark cap with a flickering, broken line of light. Ha! says the guide. Yes, a chain. Still forward the shadows to right and left grow in size. Some have a sentry silently quadding their obscurity from rash obtrusion. Where there is no sentry there is a chain. A sudden check from in front breaks the continuity of the forward movement. We move on again and low. The rocks on either hand contract, change color, break out into the gruesome design of a symmetrically built wall of bones and skulls. From the level of our heads down to the level of our feet skull rests upon skull and leans back upon the myriad bones behind. The shivering candlelight falls with an equal race upon the formal tears, it flashes coldly upon the grinning teeth, penetrates the mortarless crannies of the wall and ever shows bones of many shapes and curves. Now it lights up a rant in some skull. A ghastly, jagged wound which haunts one with the thought of foul murder. A nun, it shimmers with erratic play on the trickling water that pursuing its silent way from year to year has crusted with the smooth glass the skull beneath. Again the crowd checks. In the moment's pose you approach the wall. A north stained skull, perhaps larger than its comrades centers your attention on his sunken orbits. You brood over it, are drawn to it and as in a dream lay hands on its smooth cranium the cold, clammy contact. Ha! how different from the warmth of a loving friend. Yet perchance, this, these two, was once a friend, the lodestone of a deep brood love. On again once more and this time quicker. The skull's flash passed in confused lines. It is the dance of death. A rock shoots into view, bursts through the skulls. It is marked with black characters which tell you that it is sometimes better to die than to live. Rock and lettering fade back into darkness but again and again the light outlines a phrase such as tombeau de la révolution, tombeau des victimes or a motto that sings deep into the soul. The designs in skull and bone become more complicated. The walls become more lofty. Rush from straight lines into curves assume the form of a stone. A round and about you are skulls, skulls, skulls. Once these residues of men were even as you and I are now. Think of it, each mouldering bone was once part of a life. A life. But now tragedy and comedy lie in differently side by side. Riches and poverty, the great and the low, lie joe by joe. Tragedy and comedy lie in differently side by side. Riches and poverty, the great and the low, lie joe by joe. Tragedy and comedy lie in differently side by side. None too great, none too humble, to enter into death a slavish gift to the darkness that reigns in the catacombs. Their world has passed away and the old order has given place to the new that now surges and seethes by their crumbling bones. They have been but a tide in the ocean of life. They have flowed and they have ebbed. But even as you dream or guibe, according to temperament in one of these chapels, a faint, pronounced rustle comes stealing to the ear, swells and falls and vanishes mysteriously as it came. What was it? The guide catches an incurring eye and explains with a wealth of incisive gesture that it is the rats moving. He makes the blood run cold with the horror of his account, of those who have been lost in the catacombs and hunted to their death by the sharp teeth rodents. He expatiates with pardonable pride on the precautions now taken by the authorities to guard against casualties of this nature and sings his voice to a whisper as he mentions the last hundred of 1871. He points to the dark, chain-barred passages as he tells you who and what these men were. Tisa tells that wealth in a blood-red past, a past which gave birth to the commune of 1771, the Germans had besieged Paris and taken it. They had entered the city as conquerors and with their departure the humiliated, super-sensitive city was to be further outraged by its own base of passions. The National Guard had been, even during the siege, disaffected toward the government of the Republic and with the departure of the Germans. It saw in the weakness of the government that located at Versailles its opportunity for revolt. Not having been disarmed, it possessed a brute force which gave it courage to act. It carried off the cannon to the heights of Montmartre and Belleville under the plausible excuse of preserving them from the enemy. This was, in effect, revolt. And so, Présidentière read it. He attempted the removal of the cannon on March 71. He failed and so commenced the insurrection of the commune and a siege of Paris. A hundred thousand National Guards, together with the desperate characters common to every great city, were the feuds and the sinews of this social revolution which was directed against property and labour masters. It was initiated by working men, but in its short life of two months it was to seek the power of the devil of cruelty and to encourage to the surface of Parisian life the pétroleur and pétroleuse. It was to grow drunk with blood and with sauteche-fury to fire the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Tuileries, the Ministry of France. It was to corrupt its own body with murderous excess and to slay by day and by night. Within the restraining influence of the Republican army concentrated at Versailles, it was to make itself like a fire-emprisoned scorpion. But the debilitated government at Versailles was recuperating. It drew the siege closer and hurled shut and shelled faster and faster into the writhing city. It sent out its troops under Marshal MacMahon and with bayonet and bullet it bore down the communists, slew them without trial, without mercy, with no quarter for pétroleur or pétroleuse. Ten thousand corpses lay beneath its victory. The streets and prisons were red with blood. The mark of the destroyer was unmentioned and humblest of humble buildings. By the lurid light which the recollections of the commune emit, the guide's answers to a bystander that the lost hundred were insurgents and part of the garrison of Four-Vanves becomes powerfully suggestive. And to hear a question and there a question of why of how the insurgents fled before the Republican troops on the fall of Four-Vanves and how they had rushed away from the bayonets on their track to endeavour to seek safety in the silent gloom of the catacombs. His graphic words, intensified by the environment, reconstruct the scene, painted with the vivid colours of a nightmare to the eyeballs straining to the dark mouth of the passages beyond. In thought, he takes us with the panic-stricken soldiers into the labyrinth. We feel a feverish fear of pursuit driving us further into the secretive gloom. A halt? And our laboring hearts grow calmer amidst the silence that yields no shout, no muffled footfall of pursuer. But our tortures consume faster and faster away. We must again seek light of day. Yet how? Everywhere, road across road? Silent skull by silent skull with never a clue to the open air to the living world above. Again panic seizes us. We run, run madly with manious stumble for life. Extortion finds us alone. Our comrades, gone. Our torch, guarded with trembling hand, burning low. We hear the rats gathering in their hordes outside the pale of kindly, merciful light. They throw down a skull that rolls heavily to our feet. The light? Ha! It must have been awful to have died in that thick blackness with never a ray of light or hope. And we grow thankful that, as two of the public, we move on and on to the exit at the Rue d'Aro and find their life and sunshine. End of The Catacombs of Paris. Declaration of Sentiments by Elizabeth Cady Stanton This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient's sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her an alienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right and property even to the wages she earns. He has made her morally an irresponsible being as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master, the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the laws of divorce as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women, the law in all cases going upon a false supposition to the supremacy of man and giving all power into his hands. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she has not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. He allows her in church as well as state but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry and with some exceptions from any public participation in the affairs of the church. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life. Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation in view of the unjust laws above mentioned and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States. In entering upon the great work before us we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation and ridicule but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to affect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the state and national legislatures and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this convention will be followed by a series of conventions embracing every part of the country. End of Declaration of Sentiments by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.