Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/559

 punish when day after day the mayor of one of her cities is depicted in communion with a monster compounded from the illustrations of Cope's Palaeontology, and Doré's Dante. The enforcement of the municipal law is impeded, and, therefore, the state is concerned. We are compelled to recognize that since the cry of the liberty of the press became a Shibboleth, the relation of the newspaper to the government and the people has been very much modified. No ruler now sits by divine right in his palace and writes lettres de cachet to confine his subjects in some bastile at his own will, and on the other hand the newspaper will sometimes become, not the representative of the people seeking information for their good, but a commercial venture, the adjunct of a business house, the main object of whose existence is to aid its patron in selling his wares, as anxious to attract attention to them by startling postures as a circus poster. This means that the attitude of the statesman with respect to them must be changed with the change in conditions. In this commonwealth, in the main, the country press endeavors to ascertain and further the interests of the people surrounding them. In the large cities, what is popularly called “Yellow Journalism,” with its gross headlines, its vulgar and perverted art, its relish for salacious events and horrible crimes, and all the other symptoms of newspaper disease, is gaining a foothold. There is a daily newspaper of wide circulation, published in the City of Philadelphia, ostensibly by a Pennsylvania corporation. This corporation was chartered May 18, 1899, with an authorized capital stock of $25,000, of which the amount actually paid into the treasury of the corporation was $2,500. So far as the records in the office of the secretary of the commonwealth show this amount has never been increased. A twenty-story building on the main street in the heart of the city, largely rented out for offices and other business purposes, bears its name. Since its incorporation, it has paid to the commonwealth in taxes $5.73. Since its control of what had been a useful and venerable newspaper began, every mayor of Philadelphia, every governor, every United States senator, save one who has only been in office four weeks, and every legislature of the commonwealth, has been subjected to a daily flood in its columns not of adverse comment, but of invented untruths. The state expended a considerable sum of money upon the celebration of Pennsylvania Day, August 20, 1904, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in an effort to impress upon the nation the importance of her participation in the settlement of the West. Her building and much of what she put on exhibition were Rh