The disastrous effect upon the people of such a Press as I have described is obvious. It excites the nerves of the feeble, it presents a hideously false standard of life, it suggests that nobody is secure from the omnipotent eavesdropper, and it preaches day after day at the top of its husky voice the gospel of snobbishness. But it is not merely the public manners which it degrades; it does its best to hamper the proper administration of the law. In America trial by journalism has long supplemented, and goes far to supplant, trial by jury. If a murder be committed its detection is not left to the officers of the police. A thousand reporters, cunning as monkeys, active as sleuth-hounds, are on the track. Whether it is the criminal that they pursue or an innocent man is indifferent to them. Heedless of injustice, they go in search of "copy." They interrogate the friends of the victim, and they uncover the secrets of all the friends and relatives he may have possessed. They care not how they prejudice the public mind, or what wrong they do to innocent men. If they make a fair trial impossible, it matters not. They have given their tired readers a new sensation; they have stimulated gossip in a thousand tenement houses; justice may fall in ruins so long as they sell another edition. And nobody protests against their unbridled licence, not even when they have made it an affair of the utmost difficulty and many weeks to empanel an unprejudiced jury. The greatest opportunity of the Yellow Press came when a Mr H. K. Thaw murdered an accomplished architect. The day after the murder the trial began in the newspapers, and it was "run as a serial" for months. The lives of the murderer and his victim were uncovered with the utmost effrontery. The character of the dead man was painted in the blackest colours by cowards, who knew that they were beyond the reach of vengeance. The murderer's friends and kinsmen were compelled to pay their tribute to the demon of publicity. The people was presented with plans of the cell in which the man Thaw was imprisoned, while photographs of his wife and his mother were printed day after day that a silly mob might note the effect of anguish on the human countenance. And, not content with thus adorning the tale, the journals were eloquent in pointing the moral. Sentimental spinsters were invited to warn the lady typewriters of America that death and ruin inevitably overtake the wrongdoer. Stern-eyed clergymen thought well to anticipate justice in sermons addressed to erring youth. Finally, _a plebiscite_ decided, by 2 to 1, that Thaw should immediately be set free. And when you remember the arrogant tyranny of the Yellow Journals, you are surprised that at the mere sound of the people's voice the prison doors did not instantly fly open.