suppressed tears.
“He has delivered his message,” Ernest cried. “The manhood and the deep-hidden, tender nature of their Bishop burst out, and his Christian audience, that loved him, concluded that he was crazy! Did you see them leading him so solicitously from the platform? There must have been laughter in hell at the spectacle.”
“Nevertheless, it will make a great impression, what the Bishop did and said to-night,” I said.
“Think so?” Ernest queried mockingly.
“It will make a sensation,” I asserted. “Didn’t you see the reporters scribbling like mad while he was speaking?”
“Not a line of which will appear in to-morrow’s papers.”
“I can’t believe it,” I cried.
“Just wait and see,” was the answer. “Not a line, not a thought that he uttered. The daily press? The daily suppressage!”
“But the reporters,” I objected. “I saw them.”
“Not a word that he uttered will see print. You have forgotten the editors. They draw their salaries for the policy they maintain. Their policy is to print nothing that is a vital menace to the established. The Bishop’s utterance was a violent assault upon the established morality. It was heresy. They led him from the platform to prevent him from uttering more heresy. The newspapers will purge his heresy in the oblivion of silence. The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.