STEPS OF PROGRESS
wholly baseless stories are circulated without any attempt to investigate their truth, and sometimes with full knowledge of their falsehood. There are journals which actually boast of opening their columns for the publication of any tale anonymously contributed. They recognise no responsibility except that of providing entertainment for their readers. Sometimes the unique object is blackmail; sometimes the market for gossip is alone considered. And a strange fact is that the victims of these slanders suffer in unremonstrating silence. Newspaper editors are neither flogged nor cited before law courts. This patience is largely attributable to a conviction that contemptuous indifference is the most becoming demeanour in the presence of such unscrupulousness. But the law is also to blame. It provides no effective remedy. Recourse to a tribunal of justice means that the defendant must be hunted from court to court, and that after perhaps a year or eighteen months of weary proceedings, he escapes at last with a nominal penalty. Stranger still is the blindness of journalists — of course there are several honourable exceptions — who fail to see that by taking continual advantage of the tolerance of contempt, they are doing their best to become really contemptible. Already the press occupies a very low place in the estimation of educated Japanese. They recognise its political capabilities, but regard journalism on the whole as a low calling. Public opinion does not help: its restraints
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