Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/238

 of a misty, mystical girl in a thrilling state of semi-nudity, with this quotation:

Breathless and as one entranced he gazed upon her: saw how her long hair glowed a wondrous red 'neath the kisses of the dying sun; saw how her purpled gown, belted at the slender waist, clung about the beauties of her shapely body: saw how the little shoe peeped forth from the perfumed mystery of its folds—and so stood speechless, bound by the spell of her beauty.

"The perfumed mystery of its folds!" Such is the perfumed garbage now being fed to the American public in the name of Sam McClure!

Or take the "Metropolitan," which a few years ago announced itself as a Socialist magazine. We were all tremendously thrilled by the idea that the money of Harry Payne Whitney was to be used to bring about Social Justice in America; but then we saw the "Metropolitan" suppress its exposé of Rasputin at behest of the embassy of the late Tsar; now we see it turning over its editorial columns to Gen. Leonard Wood, to be used in a propaganda for universal military training! In this greatest crisis of history, the people's cause is left without a single champion in our popular magazines. There are only the Socialist papers, and two or three radical weeklies of limited circulation; the rest is Barbarism.

In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time. The business of getting the news involves "hustle," and young brains are constantly being brought in, and these young brains have to be taught the discipline of special privilege, and sometimes they never entirely submit. They have powerful arguments on their side. "You want circulation, don't you? What's the use of a paper without circulation? And how can you get circulation if you let the fellow around the corner have this 'scoop'?" So the owner of the paper has to get busy and make a gentleman's agreement with the other papers to suppress the news; and sometimes it turns out that the other fellow isn't a gentleman, and there is a row, and the live young "hustlers" get their way for a while, and the public gets a bit of the news.

Various stages of this struggle are exemplified by different newspapers, or by the same newspaper at different times. You may see a staid old family organ—say the "New