Why this partiality? Because the public is never allowed to get agitated over the methods and practices of the department stores. Hence the politicians are neither forced, for the sake of appearance, to investigate, nor can they make political capital from a thing over which the people are not aroused. Not a line of the horrors taking place in the large department stores is ever reported in the newspapers, not a mention of the treatment of girls and women, not a word of the injunctions frequently obtained restraining these stores from continuing to sell this or that brand of spurious goods in imitation of those of some complaining capitalist, or of the seizures by Health Boards of adulterated drugs or foods.
Wherefore this silence? Because, unsophisticated reader, these same department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers. The newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight. Not a line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper print; on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations, of virtually acting as censors. The newspapers, whatever their pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large a portion of their revenue comes. It is a standing rule in newspaper offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into print. Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large department stores.
OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.
Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that