Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/259

 walking on the street, and heard news-boys shouting an extra, and saw these words, printed across the front page of the "New York Evening Journal":

WAR DECLARED!

So I parted with one of my hard-earned pennies, and read:

WAR may be DECLARED soon

But did that bit of knavery keep me from buying the Hearst newspapers forever after? It did not. I am an American, and can no more resist sensational headlines printed in a newspaper than a donkey can resist a field of fat clover. So I still take a Hearst newspaper, the "Los Angeles Examiner," and watch Mr. Hearst prepare my mind for the bloody process of annexing millions of Hearst acres to my country. Both the Hearst paper and the Otis paper print elaborate accounts of how the government is preparing to invade Mexico. There are details of diplomatic negotiations and of military preparations, stories elaborate, complete, and apparently entirely authentic. Once in a while the State Department issues a formal denial that it has any such intentions, or is making any such preparations; the "Times" and "Examiner" print these denials—and then go on blandly printing their stories! I am left to wonder which is lying, the American government or the American press.

You know the part which the newspapers of Europe took in the making of the late war, the "last" war, as we were told. You know that the Krupps owned and subsidized the "reptile press" of Germany, using it to foment hatred of France. You know that at the same time they subsidized some of the leading Chauvinist newspapers of France, to publish denunciations and threats against Germany, so that the new war appropriations might be forced through the Reichstag. Karl Liebknecht exposed this infamy in Germany, and the ruling caste of the country never forgave him, and in the crisis of the late rebellion they found their chance to pay him back.

Among the secret documents made public by the Bolsheviki were some letters from the Russian Minister to France,