inexorable tyrant, our collective belly. Every man who toils and sweats for a wage is perforce doing the same thing. The bitterness of our portion is this precisely: that we are hired poisoners, whose lot it is to kill the things we love most. To kill them, not as bold buccaneers in a stand-up fight, but to slay them artfully, insidiously, with a half-true head-line or a part suppression of fact. In my ten years of experience on various sheets as reporter, editor and Associated Press representative, I have come to know the masses with whom I had to deal. Their intellects were the pawns with which I must learn to play the editorial game. I knew for instance, sitting at my desk, just how many extra papers I could sell with a scare-line on a police scandal. I knew to how many men on the street the filthy details of some married woman's shame would prove a lure to buy. And as I watched the circulation rise or fall, day by day, like a huge beating pulse, I became familiar, somewhat, with the mental processes of the average human animal. It was my tragedy, as it is the tragedy of the majority of my fellows, that this knowledge, acquired always at a tremendous cost of our life's energies, must be used not for the uplift, but for the further enslavement, the drugging of the minds of men. How many times have I sat at my desk, and in apparently heartless fashion, cut the big truth out of the stuff that honest reporters wrote. Sometimes there were other moments in my life, as in the lives of the rest of my kind, when there were opportunities for sly sabotage—when we thought by the ridiculous speciousness of our alleged facts, to make the pseudo-truths which we pretended to propound stand forth in their gaunt shamelessness for the things they actually were. Do you remember Harwood, of the "Los Angeles Times"? If I were only with you now, I could point out to you in that daily concatenation of lies, a few truths about things, peering covertly through the mass of corruption, and seeming almost to be holding their figurative noses in disgust. How we used to chuckle when he would succeed in passing a sly sentence—a word—over the sleepy night editor at the desk! Poor intellectual Pierrots that we were! Literary Pantaloons!
But out of the tragedy of my own experience, and out of the tragedies of the experiences of the fellows I have known, I can glimpse a great light ahead. For I'm an optimist, you see. I was talking the other day to the editor of one of the sheets which poison public opinion in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a thoroughly fine, and likable chap, but I had always known him for an ultra-conservative—a kept man entirely. The conversation drifted to Russia, and to my utter astonishment he quite frankly, but confidentially, told me that he didn't believe a word of the dispatches put forth by the Associated Press—the Associated Press which hitherto had been Almighty God to him. I glanced at him curiously, and then: "You're not a radical?" I said, dubiously. "I don't know what I am," he replied. "I've lost my perspective and I haven't anchored to any economic philosophy as yet, but sometimes my thoughts are so bitter that I'm afraid of them. I've just seen a man sent to jail for twenty days," he continued. "He had been in town but half an hour, and his only crime was that he couldn't obtain work and that he had run out of money. God," he said, "some day I may be that man. I feel his feelings now, and I
