Like to a child, who far from ocean's flood Against his ear a shell doth fondly hold To hear the murmur that is his own blood, And half believes the fairy-tale he's told, So I within this shell mistake my sea Of musing for the tide of History.
Like every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle, and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction, to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our western plains.
Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from meeting my friends,--not that they are not the best people in the world, but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them. Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had of getting out of the Slough of Despond?