the contrary, so to handle the matter that as many highly
colored "stories" as possible can be run about it.

Thus, where the case is perfectly clear against the prisoner,
the "yellow" press seeks to bolster up the defence and really
to justify the killing by a thinly disguised appeal to the
readers' passions. Not infrequently, while the editorial page
is mourning the prevalence of homicide, the front columns are
bristling with sensational accounts of the home-coming of the
injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of the weak and
erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer,
until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly
deprecates the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows
that it would have done the same thing in the prisoner's
place.

This antecedent public sentiment is fostered from day to day
until it has unconsciously permeated every corner of the
community. The juryman will swear that he is unaffected by
what he has read, but unknown to himself there are already
tiny furrows in his brain along which the appeal of the
defence will run.

In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the
euphemisms of a hard-put defendant's counsel when he pictures
a chorus girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St. George
seem innocent indeed. It is not within the rail of the
courtroom but within the pages of these sensational journals
that justice is made a farce. The phrase "contempt of court"
has ceased practically to have any significance whatever. The