sterilizing all drinking water used by its employees. As part of its community service, it gives the public free of cost the use of legal and medical consultation bureaus and also bureaus for matters concerning chemistry, agriculture, and stock raising; and it maintains a show room for the display of objects relating to these branches. It conducts a school of music, gives prizes for unusual instances of self-denial and heroism, and encourages popular education. It sets aside finely appointed rooms for public meetings, lectures, plays, and concerts for charitable purposes. It provides a public library and reading-room and it has a suite of luxuriously furnished apartments for the entertainment of distinguished foreign visitors. Its magnificent building provides an observatory on the roof that furnishes information about the state of the weather, a searchlight shows the location of fires and flashes the news of important events, while a siren whistle directs attention to most unusual news.[1]
In all of these general welfare and community activities, the reports given of them by the press presumably need not be discounted,—they are often reported as news items from other cities and are to be accepted as authoritative except where allowance must evidently be made for the exaggeration possibly used by the reporting paper in regard to its own part in promoting social welfare.
It is often said that much of the welfare work carried on by the press, particularly that of collecting funds for charitable causes, is done with an eye to publicity . But the historian can not go into the question of motive, except in so far as the press itself announces the reasons for its course. The fact remains that much has been done by the press that has served the com munity irrespective of the ulterior object of the press in rendering the service.
Another side of the social service carried on by the press is found in its correspondence columns. In 1916, a popular woman's magazine listed over twenty-five hundred different topics that it had treated by letter, the greater part of them involving the
- ↑ W. R. Shepherd, Latin America, pp. 221-223; I. Goldberg, "What South Americans Read: The Newspapers. A Survey of Editors, Press and Policies," Bookman, July, 1915, 41: 478-489; "La Prensa" of Buenos Aires, 1869-1914. Pamphlet. 107 pp.
