physical status of the "future mothers of the nation." Failing any other excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the "Moral Pitfalls of Paris," or the "Vampires of High Life in Vienna." The invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a moral and virtuous slant. Thus was afforded to the appreciative reader a double satisfaction, physical and ethical, pruriency and piety. It was Capron who devised the simple but effective legend which afterward became, in a thousand variants, a stock part of every news item interesting enough to merit graphic treatment, "The X Marks the Spot Where the Body Was Found." He, too, adapted, from a design in a drug-store window picturing a sponge fisherman in action, the cross-section illustration for news. Within a few weeks he had displaced the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the city editor, who dealt primarily in news, not sensations, _panem_ not _circenses_. Sensationalism of other kinds was spurred to keep pace with the sex appeal. The news columns became constantly more lurid. They shrieked, yelled, blared, shrilled, and boomed the scandals and horrors of the moment in multivocal, multigraphic clamor, tainting the peaceful air breathed by everyday people going about their everyday business, with incredible blatancies which would be forgotten on the morrow in the excitement of fresh percussions, though the cumulative effect upon the public mind and appetite might be ineradicable. "Murderer Dabbles Name in Bloody Print." "Wronged Wife Mars Rival's Beauty." "Society Woman Gives Hundred-Dollar-Plate Dinner." "Scientist Claims Life Flickers in Mummy." "Cocktails, Wine, Drug, Ruin for Lovely Girl of Sixteen." "Financier Resigns After Sprightly Scene at Long Beach." Severance developed a literary genius for excitant and provocative word-combinations in the headings; "Love-Slave," "Girl-Slasher," "Passion-Victim," "Death-Hand," "Vengeance-Oath," "Lust-Fiend." The articles chosen for special display were such as lent themselves, first, to his formula for illustration, and next to captions which thrilled with the sensations of crime, mystery, envy of the rich and conspicuous, or lechery, half concealed or unconcealed. For facts as such he cared nothing. His conception of news was as a peg upon which to hang a sensation. "Love and luxury for the women: money and power for the men," was his broad working scheme for the special interest of the paper, with, of course, crime and the allure of the flesh for general interest. A jungle man, perusing one day's issue (supposing him to have been competent to assimilate it), would have judged the civilization pictured therein too grisly for his unaccustomed nerves and fled in horror back to the direct, natural, and uncomplicated raids and homicides of the decent wilds.