e
that claim to straighten kinky hair and bleach complexions--all fakes,
of course. Perhaps the most fraudulent advertisements, however, are
those which purpose to sell mines in Brazil, Mexico, Alaska, or
wherever else the investor is unlikely to go. These offer their shares
often as low as ten cents each, and guarantee fabulous profits. I have
a college classmate who is extensively interested in Mexican mines, and
he tells me that literally 99 per cent of all the mining companies that
float their shares through advertisements are pure, or rather impure,
swindles. I am not in the least surprised, for I know how many letters
come to a financial editor from the dupes of these slick mine
promoters, asking advice as to how they can get their money back.

The most demoralizing advertisements are those paid for by loan-sharks,
clairvoyants, medical quacks, and the votaries of vice. The New York
"Herald" has recently stopped printing its vicious personals. It also
refuses fortune-tellers the hospitality of its columns, though it is
not so squeamish in regard to loan-agencies and patent medicines. How
many papers still publish the advertisement of Mrs. Laudanum's soothing
syrup for babies? When you remember that the proprietary medicine
concerns have been accustomed to spend forty million dollars a year,
which is distributed among the papers of the land, you can see that it
requires considerable financial independence for a publisher to forego
a taste of their patronage.

It is a curious fact that, aside from the country weeklies, the papers
most plentifully besprinkled with medical advertisements are the yellow
journals, the religious weeklies, the socialistic and other propaganda
organs, and in general those which preach most vociferously reform and
the brotherhood of man.

The danger from the advertising columns is not, as I have said, that
the advertisements misrepresent the goods, but that the terms on which
they are solicited tend to commercialize the whole tone of the paper
and make the editor afraid to say what he believes. The advertiser is
coming more and more to look on his patronage as a favor, and he seldom
hesitates to withdraw his advertisement if anything appears that may
injure his business or interfere with his personal fad or political
ambition.

Let me give you some examples of the withdrawal of advertisements to
punish too daring and independent editors.

A few weeks ago the paper which, in my opinion