AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
women to prey upon him and the inmates of disorderly houses will be scattered more effectually than by raids of the police when the way has been opened to young women who have yielded to emotion nevertheless to lead respectable lives.
4. The most conspicuous and serious failures in the administration of justice in our courts occur not at all in the cases of defendants who possess wealth, as is often alleged, but through the irresponsible meddling of the press with those of a sensational character or those which concern people of prominence, and the publication of which, therefore, has a salable value. It is not to be expected that the members of a jury will weigh in even balance the evidence presented to them in the case of a man charged with murder, when his face, brutalized by some artist employed for the purpose, and the facts distorted to increase the horror, have been forced upon their attention for weeks before. In fact, the whole doctrine of the liberty of the press is a harmful anachronism. There ought to be no liberty of the press. There was a time when the interests of the people were served by it, a time when the liberties and even the lives of men were sacrificed by the arbitrary exercise of the authority of the state, but that time has long gone. The newspaper was then a means of supplying information upon which men could depend in the guidance of these affairs, but the conditions have entirely changed and it too has changed with them. In our day a newspaper, generally owned by a corporation, is organized for the purpose of making money for the stockholders by the sale of news. The motive is commercial. Its forces are directed, not toward the supply of information because it is true, but toward the securing of that which can be sold on the market. Like all vendors, its wares ought to be subject to supervision, and when, like bad meat and rotten eggs, they are found to be unhealthful they ought to be confiscated and suppressed. When the Government inspects foods, examines doctors and lawyers and super-
