to parties—you find your domestic happiness has become dependent upon your converting the whole family to your strange new revolutionary whim! And what if your youngest daughter does not share your enthusiasm for the "great unwashed"? What if your wife takes the side of her darling?
It is such hidden forces as this which account for much of the snobbery in American newspapers; the fact that in every department and in every feature they favor the rich and powerful, and reveal themselves as priests of the cult of Mammon. I have watched the great metropolitan dailies, and those in many smaller cities and towns; I have yet to see an American newspaper which does not hold money for its god, and the local masters of money for demi-gods at the least. The interests of these Olympian beings, their sports, their social doings, their political opinions, their comings and goings, are assumed by the newspapers to be the object of the absorbed interest of every American who knows how to read.
On every page and in every column of every page the American newspaper preaches the lesson: "Get money, and all things else shall be added unto you—especially newspaper attention." When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the "New York Evening Post," wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation "as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity," what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to. Some years ago my wife went for a visit to her home in the far South, after the unusual adventure of marrying a Socialist; she met one of her girlhood friends, who exclaimed:
"My, but your husband must be a rich man!"
"My husband is a poor man," said M. C. S.
Whereat the girl-friend laughed at her. "I know better," said she.
"But it's true," said M. C. S. "He has no money at all; he never had any."
"Well," said the other, skeptically, "then what are the papers all the time talking about him for?"
A large part of what is called "conservatism" in our Journalism is this instinctive reverence for wealth, as deeply rooted in every American as respect for a duke in an English butler. So the average American newspaper editor is a horse
