Page:The American Magazine volume LXIII.djvu/35

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Lincoln Steffens
21

that is appalling, — for our good, but also simply for our entertainment.

ONE OF DAVENPORT'S CARTOONS OF HEARST

This cartoon, given by Mr. Davenport to Mr. Carvalho, was never before published. It is considered by Mr. Hearst's friends to be an unusual likeness of him

Perhaps some of these specific counts may not lie against Mr. Hearst personally. But whether or not he himself is cruel, he lets his news editors be, and whether they torture their victims by his neglect or his orders, it comes down finally to the same lack of that moral sense which considers the feelings of others and of that justice which fits the penalty to the crime and condemns not the innocent family along with the guilty member thereof. Again, Mr. Hearst himself does not show hate; and he protests that he does not wish to arouse class hatred. But some of his writers hate. The economic reformers believe in the class appeal. The socialists' propaganda is directed to the cultivation of a class consciousness among the proletariat, as they call us, and they justify it on the ground that the "better people" have a class sense, and since they hang together it will be necessary to develop a similar community of interest in some larger, lower class which will, for its own sake, free the whole of us. Arthur Brisbane is a socialist, and a sincere advocate of a class conflict. Once when I asked him why he was in such a rush to bring about the change, he turned upon me fiercely. "You forget," he said, "the children that are dying now, while we dine, over on the East Side for want of sunlight and pure air and pure milk." So it may be not Hearst, but Brisbane, that breathes hate into Hearst's newspapers; but the hot feelings of Brisbane are finer than the cool protests of his chief, which do not keep his radicals from radicalism any more than they keep his news editors from inhumanity. It is Mr. Hearst's fault that the fool poor have