pious "Outlook" dealt with "The Jungle." The "Outlook" had no doubt that there were genuine evils in the packing- plants; the conditions of the workers ought of course to be improved, BUT —
To disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel — all this is to over- reach the object .... Even things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational way and in a high pitched key .... More convincing if it were less hysterical.
Also Elbert Hubbard rushed to the rescue of his best advertising clients. Later in this book you will find a chapter dealing especially with the seer of East Aurora; for the present I will merely quote his comments on my packing-house revelations. His attack upon "The Jungle" was reprinted by the Chicago packers, and mailed out to the extent of a million copies; every clergyman and every physician in the country received one." I have a copy of his article, as it was sent out by a newspaper syndicate in the form of "plate-matter." It occupies four newspaper columns, with these head-lines:
ELBERT HUBBARD LASHES THE MUCK-RAKER CROWD. Says "The Jungle" Book is a Libel and an Insult to Intelligence, and that This Country is Making Headway as Fast as Stupidity of Reformers Will Admit.
After which it will suffice to quote one paragraph, as follows :
Can it be possible that any one is deceived by this insane rant and drivel?
And also the friend of my boyhood, my beloved "New York Evening Post"! This organ of arm-chair respectability — I have reference to the large leather receptacles which you find in the Fifth Avenue clubs — had upbraided me for a harmless prank, "The Journal of Arthur Stirling." Now comes "The Jungle"; and the "Evening Post" devotes a column to the book. It is "lurid, overdrawn.... If the author had been a man who cared more for exact truth," etc. Whereupon I sit myself down and write a polite letter to the editor of the "Evening Post," asking will he please tell me upon what he bases this injurious charge. I have made patient investigations in the stockyards, and the publishers of "The Jungle" have done the same. Will the "Evening Post" state what investigations it
