carry the national elections. If the millionaires will fatten the campaign fund plenty of Democratic candidates for Congress will be found hungry to promise allegiance to 'expansion at a slow pace.' Expansion is secure. As the trusts contribute campaign funds to both parties, so do expansion millionaires. It makes no difference which party has the majority, expansion will have the majority when the vote comes on it-always barring the teeth of the mastiff. For after all McKinley did not wholly dispose of Destiny, it still wavers on the question whether the people will bite.

When they say build ships and expand, it is not for a job or glory or vulgar money. The expanding affirmations of Deity Dewey will 'carry more guns' than a thousand horse-sense arguments, because a simon-pure naval patriot can only express simon-pure wisdom. A Vienna paper reports that Dewey said, "Who is to disarm first? The experiment was tried in the United States, and look what it cost us to get ready in time and how we had to face the issue. We now think differently and are building forty men-of-war. We shall not be taken by surprise and found unprepared again, and it is hard to believe, in view of our terrific exertions, that the other powers will abandon the advantage of their armament and give them up." His opinion cabled from elsewhere was, "We need a large and thoroughly equipped navy that can cope with any other power. Our next war will be with Germany." He may not have been so childish as to say this about Germany, but he probably thinks it. If as a nation we

honored horse sense more we should realize that the only cause we can ever have for fighting Germany is our new expansion greed.

About the time Dewey was spawning these fateful eggs the Associated Press published from Washington the following information: "Admiral Dewey today filed in the Court of Claims through his attorneys his claim for naval bounty growing out of the battle in Manila Bay,

May 1, 1898. This is the first of this class of claims filed in this court, and it is anticipated that there will be between 4000 and 5000 altogether." What the naval prizes amount to is not yet known. Guessing at it the Washington Post apportioned $100,000 to Sampson, 9,000 to Dewey, 5,000 to Schley, to each of the captains in Sampson's fleet 4,000, to Dewey's captains 3,000, to the men on an average 165. To be an Admiral and have war give you chance to bag a hundred thousand dollars at a shot, makes your championship of immense navies financial if not sordid. Let us not dwell on this, more than to say that the naval officers are barbers, traveling drummers, self-promoters, quite as the generals are. Be it remembered how noble Shafter's tribute to himself was after the fall of Santiago! "It has been a hard campaign, one of the hardest I ever saw. The difficulties to contend with were very great. Never during our civil war were more difficult problems solved."

He

Expansion prizes strike the commercial millionaires from all sides, but a single case at this point will show the genesis of clouds of terrible patriotism. Irving M. Scott of San Francisco is a typical commercial millionaire. is a builder of ships. Imperialism has caused our government to go into warship building recklessly, for example three new battleships are to be constructed at a cost of $15,000,000. There are only four great building firms in the country and Scott's is one. He is an expan

sionist-purely from principle and humanity like the rest. "Beyond doubt," he said to a reporter, "the powers would be more embarrassed if the United States let go the islands now than if they held them. Diplomats are relieved, because we hold Manila. Unless the United States keeps the islands under direct control, they believe the interests of all countries would suffer severely, and serious complications would probably arise." How lucky it is that we can relieve diplomats by awarding fifteen million dollar contracts to American battleshipbuilders!

CHAPTER IX.

The Bandit Press.

1. As General Hell-Maker.

The press of the United States vaunts itself the possessor of great power. It has a power similar in many respects to that of the politician. The politician is a representative personage, whose force lies in the fact that after the people have performed the single self-governing act of his election he does as he pleases. The press is a representative personage for whose erection to influence not even one democratic act is needed or performed. The owner of the press must have money; that answers for the periodic election of the politician. With money the newspaper becomes a representative voice of the people, not because the people chose or established it but because few people have vast sums of money to put into a newspaper and make it stand. The people accept what is given them and it passes for representative because they are unable to put anything really representative in its place.

But the people are thoroughly conscious that the press does not represent them and chafe increasingly under its pretensions to do so. With the concentration of wealth the press becomes less and less representative, less and less truly popular, for it ceases to depend on popular support for existence and depends on bodies of concentrated wealth, its great advertisers. The people recognize this change of the press center of gravity and feel it distinctly in newspaper treatment of popular issues.

The difference that has taken place is this. Formerly the newspapers sought to discover and vocalize the sentiments of the people, because if they had not done so it would have wrecked their prosperity; now they coolly give out as popular opinion whatever it suits them to have pass for public opinion; and as they are entirely independent of the will of the people and do not subsist by the people's support, it does not affect them or their interests if what they publish as popular will is the strict reverse of it. It was formerly the boast of the press to mould public opinion by educating it, but now it is able to produce at a moment's notice, over night, any public opinion that is required without asking or needing the public concurrence. In this sense public opinion is absolutely controlled by the press. Whatever popular sentiment it desires it manufactures, publishes, announces to be the will of everybody, hears no dissenting voice, and accepts the matter as settled-and so do the people.

The single fault of this process is that the opinion published has no element of the public in it. The popular sentiment which the press thus creates and sends out labeled, 'By the people,' is always that sentiment which is agreeable not to the masses of people but to the masses of press capital and the other volumes of concentrated riches from which the press draws its current sustenance. But it is as if these utterances were the public mind, for the press holds the avenues of popular speech and the people are obliged to be mute.

It is a circumstance of no slight meaning, this total detachment of the press from the people. Its significance is that public opinion is never really expressed and therefore never really even formed-in short, that public opinion has ceased to be a force or to exist. This is certainly startling when we reflect on the decay of the pulpit and platform, the other leading modes of public expression. Whether the press was the main cause, it was a great cause in the decadence of these institutions, for the audi

ences reached by the press grew so large that in contrast the number addressed by a pulpit or platform orator seemed hardly worth the labor and machinery of gathering them together. The press has even taken to preaching as a business investment, having a corner in its Sunday edition for compact little sermonlets from the pens of divines, for five cents-much less than the rental of a pew--furnishing the public with religion and rescuing it from the Sabbath labor of walking to church.

Rather the greater cause for the decline of the sacred and secular platforms has been the moral shrinkage of those who occupy them. The pastor has declined into an advocate and retainer of the wealthy class, the platform reasoner into a party politician and monger of prejudice, in each instance forfeiting popular confidence and leaving the field in possession of the press which at least makes thin moral pretensions.

The people are left without a voice. The effect upon them of this loss of speaking power is a paralysis of both thinking and action, while those who command the avenues of expression are able to palm off ready-made, selfinterested opinions on the people, making the impression upon each reader that although he does not believe this way others do and leading him to act or acquiesce with what he believes to be the majority view. The main influence of the press comes through this deception. It brazenly proclaims what it calls public sentiment, in which perhaps not a single unit of the public agrees, but all are silent because each dimly fancies that there must be such a sentiment somewhere, not crediting the press with the lying effrontery to declare an absolute fiction so shamelessly. Each asks himself, too, what will be the use if I protest, since the papers will not spread a dissenting note? The people's mouths are closed with the rivets of necessity for they have no journals of any magnitude through which they are free to speak, the journals that profess to side with the people being conducted by