" It was all
a familiar story to me, and when I sat beside that dead shoemaker
and, looking through his papers, read there that the tragedy of a
hundred years before was his family story, I knew that I held in
my hands the means of paying off all accumulated scores to date.
Did I settle in full? Yes, I did. I was in a fight not of my own
choosing, and I was well aware that my turn was coming. I hit as
hard as I knew how, and so did they. When I speak of "triumphs,"
it is professionally. There was no hard-heartedness about it. We
did not gloat over the misfortunes we described. We were reporters,
not ghouls. There lies before me as I write a letter that came
in the mail this afternoon from a woman who bitterly objects to
my diagnosis of the reporter's as the highest and noblest of all
callings. She signs herself "a sufferer from reporters' unkindness,"
and tells me how in the hour of her deep affliction they have trodden
upon her heart. Can I not, she asks, encourage a public sentiment
that will make such reporting disreputable? All my life I have
tried to do so, and, in spite of the evidence of yellow journalism
to the contrary, I think we are coming nearer to that ideal; in
other words, we are emerging from savagery.
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