The Examiner’s Justification

IT would be amusing if it were not, after a sort, pitiful to see the Examiner’s daily and painful plea of justification in its anarchical assaults on President McKinley. The Hearst papers having been repudiated by the reputable press and people of the United States, the Examiner hails with delight any comfort that it can get from the most obscure press. So it daily prints its own praises from the “Weekly Gizzard,” the “Lone Canyon Guzzle” and “Dry Creek Hee Haw.” These sheets generally hark back to what Republican papers said about Mr. Bryan when he was a candidate to justify Hearst’s persistent insults of William McKinley after he was President and the campaign was over. In 1896 and in 1900 the campaign cartoons of the Republican and Democratic press were fair offsets. No one objects to exhibiting them side by side as samples of party zeal and American campaign enthusiasm, or even of partisan bad taste.
     But Mr. Hearst cannot vicariously plead what happened in a campaign as justification of what he did after the campaign was over. Nor will such plea, though cunningly made, deceive the people who have determined that his style of journalism shall receive no further encouragement.
     There is no offset in the practice of the Republican press to the Examiner’s cartoons of the President as a negro minstrel, as the weak tool of robbers, as a pupil of Fagin, as the enemy and hater of the common people. Nor is there any such offset to the Examiner’s indorsement [sic] of the assassination of rulers and Presidents, and its almost daily suggestion that the murder of President McKinley would beneficially change history.
     Of course that paper relies on the brevity of memory, but that its reliance is not very strong is shown by its ceasing to print the line of insulting pictures which it had prepared. If it were doing right in its own estimation and in that of its defenders, “The Gizzard,” “Guzzle” and “Hee Haw” organs of obscurity, why does it not continue the course out of which it was kicked by the country’s indignation?
     It attacked and insulted and suggested the murder of President McKinley because of the policy of his administration. Now that President Roosevelt is carrying out that exact policy to the letter, why, if it were right before in cartooning Vice President Roosevelt as a grinning effigy and utterer of nonsense, does it not continue to do so? The Examiner is very illogically justifying itself in doing what it dare not continue to do, and the intended praise it gets from “The Gizzard,” “Guzzle” and “Hee Haw” is of no value whatever as an indorsement [sic] of a course that it has been compelled to abandon.
     Naturally it expects to resume its old ways at the old stand, when its scare is over, but at present it has seen a ghost just as it blasphemed, and it will not dare swear again for a long time.