Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/850

 Running a Socialist Paper

(From "Comrade Yetta")

(See pages 205, 244)

For half an hour they bent their heads over balance-sheets. It was an appalling situation. The debt was out of all proportion to the property. To be sure much of it was held by sympathizers, who were not likely to foreclose. But there was no immediate hope of decreasing the burden. Any new income would have to go into improvements. The future of the paper depended not only on its ability to carry this dead weight, but on the continuance of the Pledge Fund and on Isadore's success in begging about a hundred dollars a week.

"It's hopeless," Yetta said. "You might run a good weekly on these resources, but you need ten times as much to keep up a good daily."

"Well, if you feel that way about it, Yetta, I hope you'll resign at to-night's meeting." His eyes turned away from her face about the busy room, and his discouraged look gave place to one of conviction. A note of dogged determination rang in his voice.—"Because it isn't hopeless! Our only real danger is that the executive committee may kill us with cold water. If we can get a committee that believes in us, we'll be all right. A paper like this isn't a matter of finance. That's what you—and the other discouragers—don't see. You look at it from a bourgeois dollar-and-cents point of view. It's hopeless, is it? Well, we've been doing this impossible thing for more than a year. It's hopeless to carry such indebtedness? Good God! We started with noth