to the King to assure him of their willingness to meet the demands of a lengthened military service. It was a time of visitation such as may not come to a people once in centuries. It has shown tangible results in the action of the Riksdag, which recently appropriated money for adding eight battle-ships to the navy, for extending the time of compulsory military service to one year with especial regard to the winter training of the soldiers, and in other ways strengthening the defenses of the country. The example of Sweden will probably be followed in Norway.

The measures required by the present conditions have for a time blocked all social reform legislation. The Danish Rigsdag, which had been called together expressly to ratify a long-contested constitutional amendment extending the suffrage for men and giving it to women, adjourned without taking action. The Swedish Government refused to consider a petition for woman suffrage on the grounds that it was formed for the special purpose of organizing the military defenses and could. not act on matters of social reform. On the other hand, the exigencies of war time have greatly extended government regulation of industry. It has been necessary to fix maximum prices, to forbid the exportation of foodstuffs, to organize work for the unemployed, and in some cases to seize the means

of production-all measures, the Socialists claim, which may pave the way for state monopolies.

The dislocation of business has not been so great as was at first feared. The cessation of the flow of capital from France has been a severe blow to many of the young industries, and manufacturers have had to strain every resource in order to keep their plants going, but such products as paper, wood pulp, canned goods, and iron are needed even in war time, and there is no reason to fear that the demand will fail. Shipping and commerce have been turned from their usual channels, but the way to America is still open, and though the supply of food from Germany and Russia is stopped, ship follows ship across the Atlantic bearing the products of Western grain-fields.

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are working out their problems of readjustment in an isolation that is not only material but intellectual. If they are but left unmolested, their splendid industrial and social development will not be permanently checked, though it may be hampered for a time. prophets are true who claim that the end of the war will see the re-establishment of more and smaller states, then a stronger and more self-reliant Scandinavia will be ready to take her place among the nations of the world.

If the

The names

O`

NCE I was a newspaper man; now I am a clergyman.

Why the impossible jump? Let

me tell you.

It wasn't so many years ago that I began my career as a reporter. I had believed that any man who wanted to be of real service to his generation, using what talents he possessed, had better line up with the modern newspaper. Experience proved that I was mistaken.

Newspaper owners will sing to you long on the high theme of "the splendid freedom of the press." But let Mr. Advertising Man. from Rushabout & Co., appear in the sanctum door and growl, "Nope. That story don't go," and you'll hear the managing editor bawling into the city room: "Kill that Rushabout story!"—and the owner goes on singing his charming ballad of the press's freedom!

Before the new régime came on the paper

1914

with which I was connected, there was little attempt to defy the dictation of the department store to our city room. Every paper in the city slipped easily along on the same basis. For many of us who loved a good story the restraint meant irritation, and a not infrequent outburst of a Socialistic nature against the system to which our paper was a slave. Such flagrant abuse, however, was saved for the afternoon, when we sat around in a group smoking and waiting for the last edition to come up from the presses. Meanwhile the public, which we were somehow supposed to serve, went on paying its money for the news, much of which never filtered through to its unsuspecting mind.

One day there came to the city desk from our police headquarters man a story to the effect that a woman had been seriously hurt in an elevator in one of the department stores. She was a prospective mother, and her hurt was irreparable. Not a line appeared in our paper; not a line in any other in the city. Some months later both the woman and her husband, who had taken the case into court, were awarded damages on separate judgments running into thousands of dollars. Our reporters, with representatives from every other paper, "covered" the story in court. It became the talk of the town among newspaper men. Not a word concerning the case, however, was ever seen in the columns of the gloriously free press of the city. The advertising manager of that store had said No" and the puppet press had eaten out of his hand, because certain stockholders of the city papers ate freely from that department store treasury, and didn't care to have their meals curtailed.

66

Then the paper on which I was working changed ownership. Great things were to result for the good of mankind in general, and of that city in particular. The new owners were men of ideals. Every other paper in the city was subsidized, but we were to print the truth and shame the devilso we said in our opening editorial. Along with the new régime came Parr, a managing editor with a personality that gave off sparks, and with convictions in the realm of the ideal that were as unbending as a steel rail.

On the day after his arrival he called the staff together for a meeting. Sitting on the edge of the chair and pounding his knee, while his eyes flashed, he said:

"This town needs a newspaper with a backbone. Every sheet in this city, includ

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ing the one on which you have the honor to work, has been edited by the advertisers of this town until truth has been starved to the verge of death, so far as the press is concerned. Let me say to you, and let me drive it into your brains, that from this time on this paper will print the truth without fear or favor, and at whatever cost. No department store in this city can dictate the policy of this office. We are going to print the truth."

When the door banged behind the managing editor we sat still in our chairs.

Hum," mused the city editor, and walked back to the desk.

The next morning, when we came down to the office, there glared out at us from twenty places on the clipping-pasted wall, in scare-head type, the word "Truth.” It was to be burned into the consciousness of every reporter.

Such was the ideal.

For some months we did print the truth. From week to week in that next half-year the copy of many an advertiser disappeared from our pages. We had printed more than one story that had "broken" in a department store, that no other paper in the city carried, and that never would have appeared in our columns in the old days. But the counting-room was paying heavily for our ideal, and the faces of the new owners began to show lines. They talked it over with Parr. He refused to give way; he would continue to print the news without favor to special interests.

One afternoon just at this time, when the tension was making itself felt through the whole plant, I dropped into Parr's office to find him shouting into a telephone while he beat the air with his free hand in a characteristic way: "I'm sorry, sir, but that story will be printed in our last edition. It's on the press now. You may be able to swing the other newspapers in this town into line, but you can't gag this sheet."

He slammed the receiver up, and, jumping out of his chair, began to pace up and down the room. Turning suddenly to me, his eyes blazing disgust and defiance, he said:

"One of Bloomington's girls dead. Overcome by the heat. Taking stock every night for three weeks in this kind of weather! Curry told Gates there wasn't any story there-Gates standing over her dead body! No story? Good God in heaven, they work those little girls until they drop dead-and then tell us the public has no right to know!

But they'll know this, if it's the last story I ever print in this paper. I've just told Curry so; told him to pull out his advertising-pull out anything, but the story goes-it goes."

I shook hands with Parr and went back to the city room. The boy had just come up with the last edition. There was the story on the front page-a quiet enough little story; just one of the endless tragedies of an industrial system gone mad--but it was there. And I somehow felt it would be the last of the kind for many a long day. Such truth couldn't last much longer in those pages.

A few days later there dropped in to see Parr the advertising man from one of the big clothing firms. We had carried their copy for years a full page three times a week.

Now it happened that the head of this firm was also the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the City Hospital. We had known for a long time that conditions out there at the hospital were not what they ought to be. Parr had contemplated a study of the place, and an exposé for the benefit of the city whose citizens owned the hospital.

"Mr. Parr," began the advertising man, "I want to ask you not to use that City Hospital story. I've seen the other papers, and they've all agreed to keep it quiet. It might be misunderstood."

Our police reporter had turned in the story, which seemed harmless enough on the surface, and yet it might have been misunderstood," as the advertising man had intimated.

That morning a railway man, who had been taken to the hospital for some minor injury, and who had been sitting on a balcony off the convalescent ward, sunning himself, the last time any one who would talk had seen him, was reported dead. There were details of the story that pointed to a need of investigation. The reporter had felt convinced that the man had died as the result of criminal carelessness on the part of an attendant.

Parr stated these facts to the representative of the chairman of the board, adding : "It strikes me, sir, that that story concerning a public institution is a story that the public has a right to know. When we sell a newspaper, we are supposed to sell all the news, and the readers of this paper pay their money for it, believing that they get the news. You are going to tell me that if I print that story your chief will withdraw his advertising. My sense of ethical distinction may be

clouded, but I can see no difference between your threat and your placing in my hands, if you should see fit to do so, $5,000, with the understanding that the story wouldn't be printed. If one is blackmail, so is the other." "You are undoubtedly right, Mr. Parr," replied the emissary of the merchant prince, "but my salary depends on keeping that story out of the papers."

Parr went downstairs to see the Chief— a newspaper owner who had started a reform movement in the rottenness of the city's newspaper conditions, and whose nerve had flattened out along with the treasury.

"I've got a City Hospital story upstairs. Mr. Black. Bloomenstine's man has just been in to tell me that it mustn't go-with the usual threat attached."

The Chief was watching the picture of his wife that occupied the central place on his desk. Turning to Parr, and noting the peculiar set to the managing editor's jaw-a characteristic that the Chief had grown to dislike in the last few weeks-he demanded, softly: "Well ?"

"I'm going to print the story," said Parr. The Chief watched the picture for a long time so I was told. Then he began as follows:

"Now, Mr. Parr, I think I understand your feeling in this matter. We've worked together on this thing long enough to know each other. No man wants to print a clean paper more than I do. I've wanted to, right from the day we took hold of this thing, and I still want to. But I tell you that I have come to the conclusion that no man, and no group of men, can print that kind of a paper in this town without going into bankruptcy. We've printed that kind of a paper for a year. You know the result. Look at our advertising pages. You know the list of business that's gone out of our columns. We've absolutely got to have the money. Bloomenstine's contract is one of the biggest we carry. I've almost prayed that no story would break there that they wanted suppressed. There's only one way out-we can't print it."

More conversation followed in that interview, most of it, however, from Parr. He repeated it to me in detail, but I cannot repeat it here.

I've always had a real sympathy for the Chief. I knew how many other men had gone down with their ideals under the pressure of that cultured town's finely worked out

1914

system of news suppression. But I've always wished he had had more red in his blood.

We didn't print the story.

A few days later there happened one of those strange coincidences that often take place in a newspaper sanctum.

There tottered into Parr's office a little bent woman dressed in black.

"I would have been proud to have her for a mother," said Parr, in telling me about it soon after. 66 She came in here because, she said, she didn't know where else to go. She told me that she had buried her husband the day before. He had been a railway man. He had been taken to the City Hospital, where he was getting well. Suddenly word came that he was dead. When he was brought home, she noticed a fresh wound on his face, and began to worry about it. She has four children, expects another, and hasn't a cent in the world. And they say the public has no right to know! Well, I'm sor ry we didn't print the story. But I'm through."

This happened the week before I left for the theological seminary. At the end of the month Parr said good-by to the paper. I I think he must have smiled bitterly as he looked up for the last time at those legends on the walls of the city room proclaiming in bold type: "Truth!"

Every paper in the city had suppressed the story-even the one that in the " old families" was quite on a par in sacredness with the Bible. I have often entertained myself by musing on the question of what some of the nice old ladies of those nice old families in that center of culture would have said if they could have seen the blank form printed in the office of their nice old newspaper-a form for the use of the city editors of the town. It read as follows:

"We, the undersigned city editors of hereby agree not to print the

story." There were spaces for the names of each editor. So far as I know, those forms are still in use.

"The public gets what it wants!" Splendid saying!

The rank and file of newspaper men—the men who actually produce the papers-are men not only of brains and ideals, but of nerve fiber that measures a high standard of moral courage. But the newspaper owners

of America as a class have shown about as low an acreage of courage as could well be produced in any one profession. So it seems to me, rash as it sounds.

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If the qualities of courage and idealism have begun to be strengthened among this class in the last few years, as they very possibly have, that result has been due largely to the relentless and growing demand of the public, pertinently voiced here and there by a fearless and militant magazine, for a press free in actuality instead of in name.

While it is undoubtedly true that there have always been men in the pulpit who could be bought for money-though that buying, under the "old dispensation," was usually quite unconscious, I fancy, on their part-and while it has been equally true that there have always been newspaper owners who could not be bought for money, yet I believe that the generalizations I have made will stand.

To-day it is a truism to say that we are speaking in different ethical categories from those in vogue ten years ago. To-day the men in the pulpit who can be bought scarcely exist, though there are still a few remarkable examples. While not so much can be said for the newspaper owners, the standards are steadily rising under the new enlightenment.

It was hard for me to break away from the old life. It was harder still for the men I had worked with through many a fire and murder story to comprehend the queer twist of my mind that would lead me so far off the path of real existence. For to the regular run of reporters a clergyman is a person who might quite as effectually live on Mars as on the earth, so far as any contact with the world is concerned.

I remember the last few minutes of my last day in the city room. I remember standing by the door shaking hands one by one with the fellows. They couldn't understand -not at all. A reporter leaving the ranks to become a minister! To them it was a reversal of values, perversion, infamy. A reporter leaving life to be lost for three years in the cloister of a theological seminary-it was very sad.

I looked back into the old city room, with its chaos of disorder, so different from any place in the world outside of a newspaper office. I glanced up at the bell from which many an alarm had started me off into a cold winter's morning to cover a fire when as yet the sleep was scarcely rubbed from my eyes. The dusty, wrecked typewriters under the low-hanging paper shades of the electric globes set me smiling. We had

cursed the business office roundly for the slave-driving economy eloquent in their moaning keys.

I ran into Parr in the hall.

Let me tell you something," he said, reaching out his hand. "You'll have a hard time getting this stuff, bad as it is, out of your system. You'll find the soul-saving business pretty tame in comparison. Well, if you ever want to come back, there's a job waiting for you wherever I'm hanging Best telegraph man I ever had was an ex-preacher. Good luck."

out.

A few days later I was in a world that most assuredly was different. Inside the seminary walls I was as out of touch with the world I had known as I might have been had that world sunk into oblivion. It was like taking your hand from the pulse of life and touching something dead. Think of it -a reporter playing the theologue!

It seemed to me that I had left the seat of the spectator and become a pantomime actor in a dream play. I examined the folds of the dignified academic gown I was forced to wear at lectures and chapel, and speculated on the utility of such a scholastic garb for a reporter covering a fire.

But my reportorial preconception of theological seminaries was to get a jolt.

In the lecture-room I discovered very human and many red-blooded professors, alive to life in its every form. My respect grew. I found that they were dealing fearlessly in lectures with those problems of existence that had so fascinated me in college. I found that they were trying to give an answer to that problem which, after all, lies at the root of human existence-elements of which enter into the majority of a reporter's stories-the bared human soul face to face with destiny.

The anæmic theological professor of the reporter's brain had no existence in fact-at least in this seminary. Some of the professors could hammer the wind out of a punchingbag in the gym or out of an over-chesty theologue with astonishing facility.

For some years I had been recording the actions of human beings. I discovered that these men in the seminary knew infinitely more of the "why" that lay underneath such actions than the ordinary reporter knew. They were daily putting the universal soul of humanity under the microscope.

I had gone there half sharing the belief of

my fellow-reporters that theology was a science—though I never would have called it a science that had remained untouched by the progressive thinking of the last century. From time to time we had printed a tele graph story with a "scare-head" announcing to a gullible public that "Professor Smith, Such and Such a University, says the whale didn't swallow Jonah."

I had supposed that such a lack of literal belief on the part of any one was looked upon by seminary professors and their followers in the Church as heresy of the first water. I had supposed that the "news value "of such a story came from its uniqueness. That particular professor must be a bright-red radical, feared and hated by all "orthodox" sisters and brothers. Even in its endless repetition from time to time it always seemed to me a jolting piece of news. What, then. was my surprise to discover that its news value came from the ignorance of newspaper men and the public!

I remember reading in one of the popular magazines a series of articles called "Blasting at the Rock of Ages." The author had set out to prove, with masterful naïveté, that the higher criticism of the Bible was a thing known only to the universities; that in the theological seminaries it was walked around with soft shoes and mentioned with elevated eyes. By quoting skillfully selected fragments from the Bible lectures of leading thinkers in the universities of America the author made out a startlingly plausible case for the title of his series. When one had read it, one felt that the Bible truly had been blasted into splinters; that theological seminaries were reeking with the smell of the Middle Ages. I personally got to feeling very sorry for theological students, pitiable young gentlemen of delicate nerve structure who were being carefully shielded from the black monster known as higher criticism. I began to think that religion, anyway, was a gigantic, superstitious fraud, unloaded on the poor public by theological.spellbinders, whose "game" was now, however, being thoroughly exposed and dissipated under the brilliant sun of the modern age.

Like the rest of the public infected by that series of magazine and newspaper stories, I developed many mental maladjustments. Of course I found at the seminary that the higher criticism was not only familiar to the professors and students-in itself a surprise