The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.
In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies, through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash their hands of crime by suggestion.
In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to house peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That, not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting wife.
“Noblesse oblige.” Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust, and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.
The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals from the bottom.
The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the “four-flushing” blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently. He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses about in a “Packard Six,” and wouldn’t appear on the street “on a bet” under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads “easy-money” all along the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance, “fake-scheme” cult of him alone draw down annually close to five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses, the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic sporting mongers may give their dupes “the laugh.”
It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to refuse any part of the actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at the best to play for their “pile” and make hard working men and women foot the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.
Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you, ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn’t abide them that shift labor to other backs.
Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still, search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly at strings on the “rake off.” This from the college graduated “sport” who heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the paraphernalia of blood-spilling “pugs.”
Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount of physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of physical punishment.