nt quite as well as the mother-slave of
to-day, who bears her children at the will of an irresponsible man, and
then, often enough, has to take care of them and him too.

[Illustration]

"Wealth protects and animates art and literature, as the dew enlivens
the fields."

Nonsense! Wealth animates art and literature, as the whistle of the
master animates the dog and makes him wag his tail.

THE MODERN NEWSPAPER.

Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.

Figure first, then, a hastily erected, and still more hastily designed,
building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of London, and a number
of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile
swiftness. Within this factory companies of printers, tensely active
with nimble fingers--they were always speeding up the printers--ply
their typesetting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a
sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little, brightly
lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of
telephones and a clicking of telegraph instruments, a rushing of
messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and
copy. Then begins a roar of machinery catching the infection, going
faster and faster, and whizzing and banging. Engineers, who have never
had time to wash since their birth, fly about with oil cans, while paper
runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you must
suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor car, leaping out before
the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents clutched in his
hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," getting wonderfully in
everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are
waiting get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your vision with
collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the parts of this
complex, lunatic machine working hysterically toward a crescendo of
haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last, the only things
that seem to travel slowly in those tearing, vibrating premises, are the
hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those
stresses. Then, in the small hours, in the now dark and deserted streets
comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at every
door; bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and flung
about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and clatter
east, west, n