ers. When an elevator falls down in an office-building
and somebody is injured, the headlines ring to heaven. A similar
catastrophe in a department store is considered of hardly sufficient
human interest to publish. The name and shame of a woman caught
shoplifting in a department store can seldom be kept out of the papers.
A department store caught overworking and underpaying its
sales-girls--well, that is of no public concern. One of the most
striking articles I ever printed recounted the experiences of a
sales-girl in one of New York's department stores, yet it was unnoticed
by the New York papers, which are quick enough to republish and comment
on such articles when we print them, as "Graft in Panama," "Peonage in
Georgia," or "Race-Prejudice in California."

Four years ago, in our annual vacation number, we advised our readers
to go back to their boyhood village, buy the old homestead, and take a
vacation on the farm, abjuring the summer hotels with their temptations
to spend money, their vapidities and artificialities, manufactured
lovers' lanes, and old cats on the piazza. This so offended a few
hotels that they have never since advertised in "The Independent." I
will not tell you their names, but you can find out by noticing what
hotels are not represented in our advertising pages.

Three years ago I printed the life-story of a girl then on strike in a
factory. It was a simple, straightforward autobiography, giving the
employes' side of the case. Although we printed subsequently--as we are
always glad to do--a statement from the company giving their side of
the controversy, we must still be on their "We Don't Patronize" list,
judging by the amount of advertising with which they have since favored
us. Other papers have suffered still more, I understand, from the same
factory.

The great book-publishing firms are about the only class of advertisers
I know of who do not directly or indirectly seem to object to have
their wares damned in the editorial pages. Whether they have attained
more than other men to the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek;
whether they think that nobody pays any attention to a scathing
book-review, or whether they hold that the "best seller" is the
offspring of hostile criticism, I do not know. But again and again we
denounce books in our literary department that the publishers pay good
money to praise in the advertising pages of the same issue. I know of
only one prominent publishi