Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/398

 overthrown in Budapesth! All the power of American Journalism was set to keeping the workers from realizing that a nation of fifteen or twenty million people had overthrown the profit system, and was making a success of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

I have before me some letters from a correspondent in Budapesth, representing one of the most influential and supposed-to-be-respectable of the great New York newspapers. This correspondent explains that she sends her articles with the instructions that they shall be published as written or not at all—and they are not published. "One of my confrères here had an article twisted and turned about so badly that it meant exactly the opposite of what he knew and wrote to be true." And there is a group of correspondents in Budapesth, all having the same experiences, it appears:

Their economic sentences are cut out of articles and their radical articles are paid for but never printed. There isn't a day passes that we don't have an indignation meeting. One man wrote a long article for one of the prominent magazines two months ago alluding to the new order. He received a fat check with the letter announcing that the article could not be used; they wished him to write more moderately. Since my trip to Hungary and my conviction that Budapesth is the only honest place in Europe outside Russia, I am not any longer willing to write "moderately."

Only once before in modern history was there a crime like this—when the kings and emperors of Europe went to war to wipe out the French revolution, which their hired propagandists described in precisely the same terms as we now see applied to the Bolsheviki. Then it was political revolution, now it is social revolution; but the program is the same—the earth is to be soaked with the blood of revolutionists, their new ideal is to be corrupted in the military campaign necessary to its defense, and the world is to be made safe for another Holy Alliance—this time of the profit-system, of Industrial Exploitation. It is for the people, who pay for all privilege and maintain all parasites, to decide whether history shall repeat itself to the full; whether the Holy Alliance of World Capitalism is to crush for another century the hopes of the working masses of the world.