on earth in these days, and knowing he was so appointed, and bent with his whole soul on doing and able to do God’s work.” And our great centennial celebration of the reign of popular government is to be desecrated by a colossal statue of the man who is its deadliest enemy.
We have not, in this country, wholly escaped the evil effects of the vast European conspiracy against truth and honor which is carried on through the agency of “Press-Bureaus,” “Telegram-Bureaus,” “Correspondence-Bureaus,” and “Reptile-funds.” One may, for instance, readily detect the “trail of the serpent” in many of the cable despatches to the Associated Press, and not less evidently in the European correspondence of some of our leading journals. Is it not worthy of remark that so few of our great newspapers should have taken up the defence of the persecuted and imprisoned German editors? The American press, which can, upon such slight compulsion, be blatant and loud-mouthed, has been most reserved in its treatment of Bismarck; has, indeed, hardly attempted to veil its sympathy with his despotic and arbitrary measures. If this approval of tyranny went merely the length of applauding his persecution of the Catholic Church, it might be explained by the desire to pander to popular Protestant prejudice. But how shall we account for it when there is question of the degradation and enslavement of the press itself; of the violation of every principle of liberty; and of the systematic consolidation of the most complete military despotism which the world has ever seen? Might it not be possible, even, to trace to the Reptilien-fond the recent attempts to
rekindle in the United States the flame of religious hate and fanaticism? However this may be, it is unfortunately true that money is the controlling power in American as in German journalism. Its influence is as discernible in the columns of our own “independent” press as in a genuine Berlin “mud-bather’s” double-leaded leader.
“How can we help it?” said a well-known editor of Vienna. “A newspaper office is a shop where publicity is bought and sold.” “I will be frank,” said another journalist. “I am like a woman of the town (Ich bin die Hure von Berlin): if you wish to have this and that written, pay your money.” Praise and blame, approval and condemnation, are the articles of merchandise of the press, and they are offered to the highest bidder.
“When the proprietor of a journal,” says Sacher-Mosach, a widely-known and conscientious writer, who was for some time connected with the Vienna newspaper, the Presse, and afterwards with the Neue Freie Presse—“when the proprietor of a journal has entered into lucrative relations with a bank, he is not content with placing his sheet at its disposition in whatever relates to financial matters; but if the director of the bank, as sometimes happens, is a man of fancy who patronizes an actress who has beauty but not talent, he will order his theatrical critic to praise this lady without stint; and the critic will reserve all his squibs for some
old comédienne who is not protected by a bank director or by any one else. If a great publisher has all the works which appear in his house advertised in the journal, the proprietor will direct his book critic to find them all admirably written, profound, and full of the freshest and most delightful thoughts; and the author is just as certain to be praised in this sheet as he is to be torn to pieces by the newspapers in which his book has not been advertised. The first principle of journalistic industry and of the criticism at its command is to recognize merit only when and so far as it is financially profitable to do so.”[102]
It is far from our thought to wish to deny the vast power for good exercised by the press; but this is its own constant theme, and we have deemed it a more worthy, even though a less pleasant, task to point out at least some of the ways in which its power may be turned against the highest interests of truth and the dearest liberties of the people. A thoughtful and fearless work on the influence of journalism on our American civilization would be a fitting contribution to the centennial literature, and at the same time a most instructive chapter in the history of the country. The only attempt of this kind which so far has been made does not rise above the dignity of a compilation, and is without value as a philosophical discussion of the subject.
[97] Die deutsche Zeitschriften und die Entstehung der öffentlichen Meinung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Zeitungswesens. Von Heinrich Wuttke.—The German newspapers and the origin of public opinion: a contribution to the history of journalism. Leipzig: 1875.
[98] Die deutsche Zeitschriften, p. 309.
[99] This spurious document has got into many books; e.g., into Hahn’s Geschichte des preussischen Vaterlandes.