What a punishment to the guilty! what a lesson
to the innocent! what a warning to the undetected! How much beneficial
reflection and conversation it excited! How necessary, in an age of
sensation morals and free-love theories, to have self-indulgence
occasionally exhibited in all its hideous nastiness, and without any
of its fleeting, deceptive, imaginary charms! The instantaneous
detection of the Otero murderers last autumn, and of the robbers of
Adams's express-car last winter, as related in the daily papers, and
the picture presented by them of young Ketchum seated at work in the
shoe-shop of Sing-Sing Prison, were equivalent to the addition of a
thousand men to the police force. Herein lies the power of such a
slight person as the editor of the Herald. It is not merely that he
impudently pulls your nose, but he pulls it in the view of a million
people.
Nor less potent is publicity as a means of reward. How many brave
hearts during the late war felt themselves far more than repaid for
all their hardships in the field and their agony in the hospital by
reading their names in despatches, or merely in the list of wounded,
and thinking of the breakfast-tables far away at which that name had
been spied out and read with mingled exultation and pity.
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