The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1896-05-19

neither pleasing nor instructive; at Its
worst it is a veritable museum OF
horrors. There was a time when the
pictorial representation of crimes and
indecencies was left to such weekly
journals as the Police Gazette, and the
reputation of those sheets was such that
no self-respecting person was likely to
be caught reading one. If the Police
Gazette still exists it is badly crowded
in the field once its own by certain
metropolitan dailies whose taste for vul-
garities is more rank thar the disrepu-
table weekly ever dared to entertain.
The New York World is one of the worst
offenders In this line. though 1t has close
imitators in Cincinnati, Chicago and st.
Louis. Each edition of the week is filled
and running over with scandal and vul-
gar happenings. shocking crimes and
petty gossip gathered as with a muck
rake from all parts Of the country; but
1t Is on Sunday that this matter is ex-
plotted most loudly and illustrated most
deliberately. In the issue of last Sunday,
for instance, in addition to several pages
of colored cartoons of hideous design and
more atrocious coloring, which nobody
Of sane mind would stop to examine, are
a dozen or more pages filled with
pictures in black and white, hardly less
encouraging to lunacy. Sweeping across
one a is a winged monster described
as one of the man-bird inhabitants of
Mars. Across another is a row OF female
legs exposed to the knee In order. os-
tensibly, to display the newest styles in
stockings. There Is a picture Of a bat
tie with balloons, and one of a naked
man at the bottom of the sea with his
foot caught in a monster clam shell:
there is a circle of rats united by their
tails for common defense; there are rep
resentations-they cannot be described
as portraits-of Catherine De Medici and
other famous poisoners;'' there is a
picture Of an offending member of the
Shah's harem being cast from a high
tower: there are semi-nude women with
various excuses for being, and another
entirely nude save for the shield OF u
serpent coiled about her; there is a
woman standing on the coping at the
top Of a twenty-story building, and an
other woman whose body Is being
smoke for preservation by her Congo
husband; there is the mad King Of Ba-
varia in some Of his crazy antics, wild
hogs in a den of s%erpents, a woman in
rubber tights swimming through He'll
Gate @ew York's He'll Gate), Mrs.
Everett" the recent suicide. on a slab
in the morgue, a-but why continue the
list? The text Is comparatively unim-
portant, though evidently constructed
with a view to illustration of precisely
this tawdry kind. No human being can
be instructed or benefited in any way by
contemplation of such pictures. They
are not art; they are neither well drawn
bad drawings. They are simply a blotch
upon good white paper, and if the paper
that prints them al be said to have any
influence al all 1t is of a degrading sort.
Yet this paper and a few like it serve as
a text for wholesale denunciation Of
the Sunday press by critics who are not
broad minded enough to acknowledge
that a hundreds clean, reputable. we'll
conducted Sunday papers exist where
there is one Of these atrocities. II 1t Is
| only an occasional one, like the Journal,
which refrains entirely from Illustration,
a. least the majority of those that do use
| pictures attempt to be decent If they
| cannot be artistic.