But we need not go abroad.  There are papers in New York that long ago came to perfection of shamelessness, and there is no more power in venom and mud and slime to pollute them.  They have dashed their iniquities into the face of everything decent and holy.  And their work will be seen in the crime and debauchery and the hell of innumerable victims.  Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.

God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe will cry out for their damnation.  See the work of bad newspapers in the false tidings they bring!  There are hundreds of men to-day penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these honest men into the mire.  And many a window was hoisted at the hour of midnight as the boy shouted:  “Extra!  Extra!” And the father and mother who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred.  God pity the father and mother who have a boy at the front when evil tidings come!  If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand falsehoods.

The most stupendous of all lies is a newspaper lie.

A bad newspaper scruples not at any slander.  It may be that, to escape the grip of the law, the paragraphs will be nicely worded, so that the suspicion is thrown out and the damage done without any exposure to the law.  Year by year, thousands of men are crushed by the ink-roller.  An unscrupulous man in the editorial chair may smite as with the wing of a destroying angel.  What to him is commercial integrity, or professional reputation, or woman’s honor, or home’s sanctity?  It seems as if he held in his hand a hose with which, while all the harpies of sin were working at the pumps, he splashed the waters of death upon the best interests of society.

The express-train in England halts not to take in water, but between the tracks there is a trough, one-fourth of a mile in length, filled with water; and the engine drops a hose that catches up the water while the train flies.  So with bad newspapers that fly along the track of death without pausing a moment, yet scooping up into themselves the pollution of society, and in the awful rush making the earth tremble.

The most abandoned man of the city may go to the bad newspaper and get a slander inserted about the best man.  If he cannot do it in any other way, he can by means of an anonymous communication.  Now, a man who, to injure another, will write an anonymous letter, is, in the first place, a coward, and, in the second place, a villain.  Many of these offensive anonymous letters you see in the bad newspaper have been found to be written in the editorial chair.