Something has been done, of late, towards the abatement of nuisances.
Cinder-heaps have been swept away, sewers trapped, cesspools closed, and
laystalls removed from under our noses. There still remains, however, a
great deal of noxious and offensive stuff to be got rid of; particularly
since, instead of merely contaminating our air and water, it infects the
fountains of our current information. It taints the library, it defiles
the drawing-room table. This graveolent evil is the pest of soiled
newspapers--journals of ill savour--not imparted by any fetid sort of
printers' ink, but by vile advertisements, whereat the physical
nostrils, indeed, are not offended: but the moral nose is in great
indignation.
An obscure and narrow street through which few respectable persons, and
no ladies, ever pass, bears a scandalous name, and is considered a
disgrace to the metropolis, by reason of the sort of literature
displayed in its windows, which is precisely of the same quality as the
advertisements alluded to; and these, in the columns of reputable and
even "serious" journals, get introduced into families, and lie about the
house, to attract the notice, and obtain the perusal, of the younger
members of the establishment, male and female.
You may take up--or what is of more consequence--your little boy or girl
may take up--a newspaper, and read, on one side of it, a leading article
which might be preached out of a pulpit: on the other a series of
turpitudes unfit for utterance under any circumstances.
These atrocities are heightened to the point of perfection by the
circumstance that they are the puffs of a set of rascally quacks, not
the least mischievous of whose suggestions are the recommendations of
their own medicines--poison for the body which they vend to simpletons,
whilst they disseminate mental poison gratis, both in the advertisements
themselves, and in books which form the subject of them, in addition to
the other poison.
As the newspaper-proprietors whose journals are sullied by these
putrescences may be of opinion that the odour of gain, from whatever
source derived, is agreeable, and, therefore, preserve them as rather
fragrant than otherwise, the following exhortation has been addressed to
their customers:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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