V
That the newspapers might with advantage to the community be made a deal cleaner is a proposition hardly open to question. In my judgment this could be done without loss to their owners, but that is an irrelevant consideration. It is not permitted to them to urge that a decenter course would ruin them, for the community is under no obligation to make publication of newspapers profitable. To the editorial argument, “I have to live,” the answer is, “Yes, but not in that way.” That plea is precisely as valid when made by the burglar. Every one who has not committed a capital crime has a right to live, but no one has a right to live by mischief.
Clean newspapers if enterprising, honest and clever do thrive; so what is really meant by “the right to live” is the right to live in luxury—the right to a great income, instead of a smaller one. There is no such right. If there were it would spare from condemnation the grocer who sells poisonous goods because there is a demand for them, the noctivagant Dago crying his rotten tamales, the quack doctor in pursuit of his patient’s health. There is no such right.
Charles Dudley Warner said, and it is repeated after him with tireless iteration, that nearly every publisher of a newspaper is making a better paper than he can afford to make. That is true, provided (1) that good newspapers are not so well supported as bad, and (2) that publishers cannot “afford” to be poor, or only moderately wealthy. Some of the best and greatest men in the world, including Jesus Christ, have thought they could afford to be poor. Poverty is not dear at the price that one pays for it; it is dirt-cheap. Any one can afford it, and many can not afford to be without it.
The right to publish news because it is news has no basis in law nor in morals; nor dare its most intrepid protagonist assert his claim in consistent practice. Every newspaper man learns almost daily of occurrences so lurid, of sins so “sensational,” of crimes so awful that they have immunity from print. The world is not only a good deal better but a good deal worse than it looks through any newspaper. An editor has constantly to “draw the line”; he can draw it where he pleases—nobody is compelling him to “go far” in publication of immorality. To assert a right to do so; to affirm other compulsion than curiosity—that is dishonest. It is dishonest to unload his responsibility upon the shoulders of even the sinners whose sins he relates. They break the laws of decency, but they do not compel him to. They do not force him to expose for sale narratives of their offenses; they prefer that he do not. He has no mandate to make the way of the transgressor hard: we have laws for that. He has only the mandate of his pocket; if in obeying it he damage or disgust or distress the best persons among whom he lives he can not plead the profit that he makes in gratification of the others. It is no way desirable that they be gratified.
A BENIGN INVENTION
I
THE phonograph has not accomplished all that was expected of it, yet it has proved a most interesting and valuable invention. One of its achievements is of the nature of a revelation: it has proved that even the most loquacious person is unacquainted with the sound of his own voice. As reproduced by the machine, one’s voice seems to be that of a stranger: his ear does not recognize it, and he is with difficulty convinced that he hears himself as others hear him. Commonly, it is said, the effect is deeply disappointing; the tones are not so rich and mellow as he had a right to expect, and he leaves the instrument with a chastened spirit and a broken pride.
The instrument has herein a broad field of usefulness. As a teacher of humility it takes rank with the parson, the flirt, the mirror and the banana peel on the sidewalk. It humbles the orator and strews repentant ashes on the head of the ardent young woman who has taken lessons in elocution but none in forbearance. The amateur who has always a cold when pressed to sing takes on an added reluctance having in it an element of sincerity. In the meek taciturnity of the “good conversationalist” society finds a new edification and delight.