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An Over-Zealous Reporter
If you see it in the Sun it is so
if it isn’t so. A veracious reporter of that journal came around
the other day to inspect The Truth Seeker quarters and to make observations,
preliminary, we infer, to defining the degree of our responsibility
for the assassination of President McKinley. Last Sunday’s Sun contains
his report, for which he prepares the reader in the following paragraph:
“One effect of the assassination
of President McKinley has been the removal from the windows
of stores where radical literature is sold of the cheap prints
and cartoons designed to encourage class hatred and strongly
tainted with anarchy.”
And then his discovery is announced:
“At the office of The Truth
Seeker, an organ of the Freethinkers, published at 28 Lafayette
place [sic], such trash was freely displayed in the window a
week or more ago, but yesterday the window was bare. There wasn’t
a sign of a cartoon or pamphlet.”
The reporter must report; otherwise
he will not earn his money, but lest any reader of the Sun should
take him at his word we will state:
1. That a week or more previous to
the appearance of the above report in the Sun the windows of the
Truth Seeker book store [sic] contained, and there were displayed
in them, the following books and pamphlets, none of which is anarchistic:
Agnostic View of the Resurrection.
Zoroaster.
The Origin of Christianity.
Old Testament Stories.
A Tale of a Halo.
The Order of Creation.
Pray, You, Sir, Whose Daughter?
Pushed by Unseen Hands.
Facts and Fictions of Life.
Pictorial Text-Book.
Is This Your Son, My Lord?
Men, Women, and Gods.
Big Bible Stories.
Age of Reason.
Sinai and Olympus.
Travels in Faith.
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Sister Lucy and Her Awful Disclosures.
Declaration of the Free.
Ingersoll as He Is.
The Wilderness of Worlds.
Reasons for Unbelief.
Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar.
Life of Jesus.
All in a Lifetime.
Canon of the Bible.
Maria Monk.
The Reason Why.
Priestly Celibacy.
Secret Instructions of the Jesuits.
Blue Laws of Connecticut. |
2. That these thirty books were all
in the window on Saturday, September 14, when the Sun reporter says
the window was bare, and no other [596][597]
books had been in the window for at least ten days.
3. That there has not been a cartoon
in the window for two months, and hence its removal was not “one
effect of the assassination of President McKinley.” It was taken
down in August to facilitate washing the window.
Therefore the reporter told a falsehood
when he said that “cheap prints and cartoons designed to encourage
class hatred and strongly tainted with anarchy” were formerly freely
displayed in the windows of The Truth Seeker office; and he told
another when he said that the windows were bare on Saturday.
For only one truthful statement can
we give this reporter credit. He says: “The Truth Seeker came out
as usual yesterday.” That is admitted. The Truth Seeker came out
as usual for the reason that it always comes out as usual. Nothing
had happened to prevent. Whether a President be struck down by a
Czolgosz who professes to be an Anarchist, or by a Guiteau whose
specialty is auswering [sic] Ingersoll before Young Men’s Christian
Associations, The Truth Seeker comes out. Having nothing to do with
Young Men’s Christiau [sic] Associations or with anarchist literature,
its issue is not delayed in either case.
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