Truth. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1901-1908, 1906-04-07
than swear off and quit reading the news



re- When you read newspaper and are
not reading scandal you may be read
ing paid-for kilograms about the Nc {
Curdys. A straight Special Tele-
gram" in most of the newspapers last
week reads this way, THE largest bot
tie order ever given, ETC." 1t was from
Milwaukee and cost the malt man 50
a line in each of hundred high
'class newspapers"
A week before Miss Roosevelt's
marriage an Associated Press dispatch
from Washington flashed the news
around the world, Alice Roosevelts
Monkey is Dead" At first glance we
all thought the wedding was off, but
on reading the precious news we were
Informed that pet monkey presented |
to Miss Roosevelt in the Philippines |
had succumbed to pneumonia after a |
painful illness, where the best of |
medical counsel failed and every
thing but Osteopathy and Christian |
Science were tried Alas!
The daily newspaper the educator
of the people!
God help us, it may be so! 1t edu- |
Gates into inattention, vacuity, fool |
ishness, folly and sin. 1t saps con-
centration, dissipates aspiration,
scrambles gray matter and irons out
convolutions.
Watch the genus commuter rush
for his dope when he reaches the sta
ton in the morning. He may be a
Sunday school superintendent, a col
lege graduate, man of social
standing, but he must have his matin-
mess of rottenness or he would die of
fidgets. He reads of how a man in
Manitoba elopes with another mans
wife, with consuming interest. He
scans the advertising pages with their
columns of fakery and filth, and it
never occurs to him that a certain
amount of the slime that slides into
his brain must stay there and line the
vacuum.
At night when he goes home he
buys the last edition. reads the whole
thing over again written 'tother end
to. He does this for ten years, twen-
ty-does it not make him what he is?
Would you like to go to Heaven with
him?
l knew one commuter, ten years
ago, who refused to read the daily pa
pers, but instead carried with him in
his side pocket a volume of Emerson.
That man is now a marked personal
ity, welding large and healthful in
fluence in a rational way. His old
time fellow passengers are still
feverishly guzzling their last edition.
Every city in the land has periodic
perturbatlons about Jack the Stab
ber," Jack the Shipper" and Jack
the pepper" famed into flame by the
molders of public opinion, these ben
eficent educators of the people. Even
staid old Boston had a week of fits a
short time ago, when every paper in
the city combined to terrorize women
and children by conjuring forth an
awful Jack" who finally was run to
cover and found to be mischievous
cigarettist boy who should have been
left, from the beginning, to the police
and alienists. But not so! The news
papers saw their chance and they
grabbed it in gladstone glee. The per-
nicious effects of such an epidemic OF
fear to say nothing about a million
people devoting an hour a day to
reading and talking about it, cannot
be computed.
If the men who prepare the copy for
the daily papers were allowed to write
out of their hearts and state their be-
lefs, what they would say might be
worth reading. although the printed