t have been spoiled."

"You don't seem to think much of business standards," said the Doctor
tolerantly.

"Not a great deal. I've bumped into 'em too hard. Not so long ago I was
publisher of a paying daily in an Eastern city. The directors were all
high-class business men, and the chairman of the board was one of those
philanthropist-charity-donator-pillar-of-the-church chaps with a
permanent crease of high respectability down his front. Well, one day
there turned up a double murder in the den of one of these venereal
quacks that infest every city. It set me on the trail, and I had my best
reporter get up a series about that gang of vampires. Naturally that
necessitated throwing out their ads. The advertising manager put up a
howl, and we took the thing to the board of directors. In those days I
had all my enthusiasm on tap. I had an array of facts, too, and I went
at that board like a revivalist, telling 'em just the kind of devil-work
the 'men's specialists' did. At the finish I sat down feeling pretty
good. Nobody said anything for quite a while. Then the chairman dropped
the pencil he'd been puttering with, and said, in a kind of purry voice:
'Gentlemen: I thought Mr. Ellis's job on this paper was to make it pay
dividends, and not to censor the morals of the community.'"

"And, by crikey, he was right!" cried Dr. Surtaine.

"From the business point of view."

"Oh, you theorists! You theorists!" Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in
a gesture of pleasant despair. "You want to run the world like a
Sunday-school class."

"Instead of like a three-card-monte game."

"With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a
sheet like the 'Clarion'?"

"A man's got to eat. When I walked out of that directors' meeting I
walked out of my job and into a saloon; and from that saloon I walked
into a good many other saloons. Luckily for me, booze knocked me out
early. I broke down, went West, got my health and some sense back again,
drifted to this town, found an opening on the 'Clarion,' and took it, to
make a living."

"You won't continue to do that," advised Dr. Surtaine bluntly, "if you
keep on trying to reform your bosses."

"But what makes me sick," continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, "is
to have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and
shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do--and,
mind you, there's mighty little of it done--amount to, compared with the