The evil is all the harder to deal with, also, because it is like so many evils,—­all, perhaps,—­only a diseased outgrowth, from a legitimate and justifiable thing.  It is our duty to sympathize; it is our privilege and pleasure to admire.  No man lives to himself alone; no man can; no man ought.  It is right that we should know about our neighbors all which will help us to help them, to be just to them, to avoid them, if need be; in short, all which we need to know for their or our reasonable and fair advantage.  It is right, also, that we should know about men who are or have been great all which can enable us to understand their greatness; to profit, to imitate, to revere; all that will help us to remember whatever is worth remembering.  There is education in this; it is experience, it is history.

But how much of what is written, printed, and read to-day about the men and women of to-day comes under these heads?  It is unnecessary to do more than ask the question.  It is still more unnecessary to do more than ask how many of the men and women of to-day, whose names have become almost as stereotyped a part of public journals as the very titles of the journals themselves, have any claim to such prominence.  But all these considerations seem insignificant by side of the intrinsic one of the vulgarity of the thing, and its impudent ignoring of the most sacred rights of individuals.  That there are here and there weak fools who like to see their names and most trivial movements chronicled in newspapers cannot be denied.  But they are few.  And their silly pleasure is very small in the aggregate compared with the annoyance and pain suffered by sensitive and refined people from these merciless invasions of their privacy.  No precautions can forestall them, no reticence prevent; nothing, apparently, short of dying outright, can set one free.  And even then it is merely leaving the torture behind, a harrowing legacy to one’s friends; for tombs are even less sacred than houses.  Memory, friendship, obligation,—­all are lost sight of in the greed of desire to make an effective sketch, a surprising revelation, a neat analysis, or perhaps an adroit implication of honor to one’s self by reason of an old association with greatness.  Private letters and private conversations, which may touch living hearts in a thousand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as if they had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the hands of the pawn-broker!  “Dead men tell no tales,” says the proverb.  One wishes they could!  We should miss some spicy contributions to magazine and newspaper literature; and a sudden silence would fall upon some loud-mouthed living.

But we despair of any cure for this evil.  No ridicule, no indignation seems to touch it.  People must make the best they can of their glass houses; and, if the stones come too fast, take refuge in the cellars.

The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism.