El Imparcial. (San Juan, P.R.) 1918-197?, 1919-01-22
THE POLICY or SILENCE /

nion, public affairs
should. always be discussed in public not secretly.
few years ago. in 1911 if remember well, when the
presidential contest going between Roosevelt,
Wilson and Taft, the NeW York Herald was foolish
enough to alude to the first mentioned man only as the
third term candidate to the presidency; did it call
him Theodore Roosevelt anything else except stated
above BY the way it that very year when fanatic
in Chicago attempted the life of the great man. and
we don't quite recoect how the Herald told the news;
may be it changed it's policy and since then labeled the
properly may be it called the victim Egresident,
Teddy Colonel something else, and kept on refer
ring to the contestant for the presidency as the third term
candidate.
Some other New York papers incur in the same habit
once in while if any citizen is for
other dsked by the editors of the paper nothing is said
about him her. They think that silence will kill the
undesirable person.
That policy may be good in some instances many times
certain things persons should be either totally ignored
referred to just with passing word comment. An
obviously insignificant artist for instance, cannot be
discussed at length lest he thinks himself very mport
ant. The same thing may happen with literary man
woman if he or she does not amount to much, and
nevertheless reference made to either time and again.
people will finally to the conclusion that the writer
is really great and that it is simply spite and envy that
does not want to play fair with him or her.
1t seems therefore that the silence policy is good only
when applied to things that do not affect the people at
large; but for things concerning the general public it
seems to produced contrary effect to the desired
People event whose Importance the general
public should be discussed in public matter what the
personal opinion is, of the person medium discussing
the subject
No one seems to know exactly what is going in Rus
sia In the United States Senate, during debate taking
place several days the Senators confessed that they
did not know anything about the situation except by the
meagre and naccurete information that appears the
press because the censorship allows it, As they the e
gisators do not know anything about the situation they
cannot tell if the policy Of keeping troops Russia is
good policy not.
According to what the press dispatches say Lenne and
Trotzky couple of demagogues without any practi
cal experience in public affairs, without ability adi
nstrators just couple of dreaming fools, who got
top, simply because they lucky. The general public
promptly swallows all that but don't wehaye always
believed that something of real Importance is going
behind the curtains, and that day the whole world
will wake up and that the actual government of Rus
sia is not the acephalous gang engaged in orgy of
punder and destruction that they want to make us be-
eve, but something of real Importance that should have
demanded the serious attention of the world We shall
wait and see.
+, In Porto Rico we have few newspapers that have
copied the foolish policy of silence from the American
press They to only for the features of
the big New York papers, and not at all for the good
points that initiated Santiago Iglesias for
instance, according to the opinion of those papers
amounts to SO little, that they did bother much with
him May be today they have changed their minds about
the subject but now it of use for their stupid silence
made the man famous.