Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/404



male and female. It is a crime for them to invite disloyal speakers to spout for them; just for amusement. The City Club and some of the women's clubs have boosted the Red cause. Bolshevism is no toy to play with, ladies and gentlemen. An "open forum" should not be open to mobocracy and treason.

As I have said, I know several of the men and women who help to edit the newspaper in which the above murderous raving is published. These men and women will read this book, and I now request the general public to step outside for a few moments, while I address these editors privately. I speak, not in my own voice, but in that of an old-time journalist, venerated in his day, John Swinton, editor of the "New York Tribune." He is answering, at a banquet of his fellow-editors, the toast: "An Independent Press":

There is no such thing In America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to writes his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press."

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.