Tuesday, February 28, 2017

The Month of March in Roman Mythology 1914


THE STORY OF MARCH, article in the Nebraska Teacher 1914

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 Like the month of January, March gets its name from the Romans. They called it so in honor of their god Mars, for they thought he was born on the first day of this month. He had Jupiter for his father and Juno for his mother.

I am sure he would not have seemed very lovable to us, but the Romans were very fond of him and called him the protector of their nation.

He was very large and strong and had such a great voice that he could roar as loud as nine or ten thousand men. Perhaps this is another reason for naming March for him, for you know on some days the wind roars very loudly.

The Saxons, another old nation, used to call March “the loud and stormy month.”

Mars was the god of war and liked fighting and battles. He was very fortunate in battle, but once when he was wounded, he fell with such a loud noise that it sounded like thousands of men going down together. Another time the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, hit him with a stone, making him fall again, and when he was on the ground there was so much of him that he covered seven acres of ground. That is a great deal of land and would make many lots the size of the one on which this house stands.

Mars was also, so they thought, the giver of light. They fancied he held thunderbolts in his hand, and when it thundered they supposed it was because Mars threw something that made the sound.

They used to pray to Mars to send them rain, and when the land was very dry indeed, the priests took from one of the temples a stone and carried it through the city, hoping that when Mars saw it he would send them rain.

Many temples were built in honor of Mars, and when the people wanted something from him they would go to one of these temples and offer to him a horse or a sheep, or a wolf, or a vulture or a magpie. But even then they were not quite sure that Mars would give them what they wanted.

So they tried to fancy Mars sent them an answer. And what do you suppose they believed brought the message for them? I am afraid you would not guess if I gave you a whole month in which to try, so I will tell you. In a certain part of Rome were some trees business it was to look for them. If they were about to begin a new war, someone would go to an augur. Then this wise man, who really did not know any more of what was to happen than you or I, would take his staff and go out of doors. There he would pray to Mars or some other of his gods. Then he would look at the sky for an answer. He would find it in the lightning, or in the way in which certain birds flew.

There was one thing they never neglected to send with an army when it was starting out,-a “chicken coop.” The chickens in it were called “sacred chickens.” Just before a battle, when the people were very anxious to know which side would win, they would go to this coop and throw some food in to the “sacred chickens.” If they ate it quickly and scattered it about as chickens are likely to do, it was thought to mean that the Romans would win. But sometimes the chickens were tired of being carried around, and instead of coming out to eat they would mope in the corner of the coop. This would make the Romans very sad, for they were quite sure it meant that the battle would be lost.

Many marble and bronze statues have been made of Mars. You will know him if you remember that he is dressed like a Roman warrior. In his right hand he carries a long spear to represent the lightning, and on his back is a large shield, which is the thunder cloud filled with rain. In some places he will look like an old man riding in a chariot. Then he is drawn by two horses named Terror and Flight.

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Sunday, February 26, 2017

Plato's Allegory of the Cave, 1882 Article


PLATO'S CAVE, article in The Guernsey Magazine 1882

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Plato, the celebrated Greek philosopher, and founder of the Academy, was born B.C. 429 or 430, at Athens or AEgina. He was the son of Aristo, who belonged to one of the most illustrious families of Athens. He first received the name of Aristocles, but it is believed that the surname of Plato was given to him on account of the breadth of his shoulders. He studied literature and science with the greatest success, and excelled especially in geometry. He also cultivated poetry in his early youth, but soon devoted himself entirely to philosophy. When about twenty he attached himself to Socrates, whose assiduous pupil he continued for ten years. On the death of his master (400 B.C.) he retired with his fellow-pupils to Megaera, and afterwards set out to travel He visited Italy, where he had intercourse with the Pythagoreans, Archytas, and Philolaus; went to Cyrene, in Africa, and afterwards to Egypt, where it is said he was initiated into the mysteries of the Hermetic doctrines. Hence he returned to Magna Graeca, and travelled through Sicily (B.C. 390). During his stay at Syracuse, Plato became intimate with the virtuous Dion; but he incurred the anger of the tyrant Dionysins the elder, who caused him to be sold for a slave. He was ransomed and set at liberty by Anniceris, a philosopher of the time, and then went to Athens, where, in a suburb of the city, he opened his famous school, known by the name of the Academy. He soon had the most distinguished men of Greece among his pupils, and also some women. In 364 Plato made a second visit to Sicily at the request of Dionysins the younger, who had just ascended the throne, and professed a desire to regulate his conduct by the dictates of philosophy. But Plato despaired of reforming the court of the tyrant, and soon left it. In 361, however, he again returned to Sicily to attempt to reconcile Dionysins and Dion, but was unsuccessful. On his return to Athens, he occupied himself wholly in teaching and writing.


The dialogues of Plato, all of which are more or less dramatic in their character, are amongst the most popular of his works. In almost every dialogue Socrates is introduced. The death of that remarkable man is related with touching simplicity in the Phaedo.

The allegory of the "Cave" is one of the most ingenious and imaginative of Plato's compositions. It occurs in the seventh book of "The Republic." Socrates, after having laid down, in the preceding books, the fundamental principles of state which he regarded as the best for the welfare of a community, proceeds to discuss with Glaucon the important question—Who are the best fitted to control the affairs of state? Whether the welfare of the state is most efficiently preserved by those who take a high and lofty view of virtue, or by those who adapt themselves to the exigencies of the time, and who are supposed to be more practically acquainted with things as they are, or rather as they seem to be.

A number of captives, enslaved from their infancy, are represented as being imprisoned in tho profound depths of a mysterious cave, from which the light of day is totally excluded. The prisoners are chained so that they are unable to move a limb, or even to turn the head. Behind them, at a considerable distance, is a fire, affording the only light which is permitted to enter the cave. The reflection of this light falls on a wall directly under the gaze of the captives. At intervals, certain figures are made to pass before the fire, so that their shadows may be cast on the wall; and it is from these shadows alone that the unhappy prisoners have the means of forming any idea of what things really are.

The heads of the prisoners are all turned in one direction. All look towards the same wall—all observe the same mysterious shadows; and seeing nothing else, their united experience suggesting nothing else, they all arrive at the conclusion that these shadows are realities; that they do not only indicate things that exist, but that they are, in fact, those very things—that they are substances, and not shadows.

But one of the prisoners is released from his bonds. He is permitted to turn his head. He sees no longer the dusky shadows on the wall, but the fire, to whose light—knowing not whence it came—he has been so long accustomed. He sees real objects passing to and fro, but they seem to him less real than the shadows on the wall



His captors lead him up a subterranean ascent, and bring him forth on the roof of the cave. He is stunned by the novelty of the scene, blinded by the brilliancy of the light. But, after a time, he grows so far accustomed to the new world as to gaze with curious interest on its marvellous glories, and the sights which are so unlike the phantoms of the cave. With what ecstacy he looks on the variously-tinted foliage of the trees—on the green grass studded with flowers—on the marble roofs of city palaces—and on the uuruffled bosom of the sea, that stretches far away to meet the azure sky. Everything has its shadow. Not a blade of grass, not a wild flower, but its shadow is marked on the earth. And the water has its shadows—but how unlike the shadows—scarcely should we call them shadows, rather reflections in the water, reflections sharp in outline and bright with colour. The brilliant orb of day, the glorious sun, shining in all his strength, renders the picture singularly grand. Towards that orb the dazzled eyes of the poor captive are turned in wonder, fear, and love. Curiosity is lost in admiration, and admiration changes to worship. He adores the sun as the author of all which he beholds, and begins to pity the ignorance of the prisoners in the cave.

But to that cave he must return. In his descent a sense of horror comes over him, and he thinks, as the obscurity increases, that he is losing his sight. When at length he arrives in his old prison, he is gradually re-accustomed to the place which has so long been familiar, but as the shadows pass before him on the wall he sees them with new eyes, and is soon involved in disputes with his fellow-prisoners as to the nature and origin of the phantoms. They have but little sympathy with him, and as little faith in his assertions. What do they know of the sublime spectacle which he has witnessed the splendours of noontide which have stood out before his enraptured gaze? the ecstatic joy which has filled his heart? They look incredulous enough over their iron collars, and maintain their faith in phantoms against all his logic and experience.

Socrates expounds the parable. The cave is the world; phantoms, the worldly man's image of the things that are—of good and evil; the captive who is led upward to the light, the philosophic soul, which rises above the petty interests of life into the effulgent light of truth and virtue. He alone it is who, thus brought into communion with the Infinite, can rightly estimate the value and importance of the things of this life, who can form any adequate conception of the true end of existence. And therefore the conclusion of the allegory is that wise and virtuous men are the only fit rulers in the model republic; men who shall strike the chains from off the helpless captives, and shall lead them to believe in something better, higher, and nobler than in the phantoms on the prison wall.

The Strange History of Easter and the Christian Cross by Heinz Schmitz


The Strange History of Easter and the Christian Cross: An Anthology Kindle Edition by Heinz Schmitz


This book has 30 chapters and hundreds of pages, which translates to actually thousands of pages on my Kindle reader and tablet, and you can pay securely through Amazon.

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Print Length: 536 pages
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Publication Date: February 23, 2017
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Language: English
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Chapters include:

1. Paganism Surviving in Christianity By Abram Herbert Lewis 1892

2. Phallic Symbolism By Lee Alexander Stone. M.D. 1920

3. The Easter Bunny in Ancient Mythology by Katharine Hillard 1890

4. The Cross and the Steeple by Hudson Tuttle 1875 

5. The Symbology of the Easter Egg by Jennie Croft 1906

6. The Use Of The Cross Before The Time Of Christ 1886 by James M Ludlow D.D.

7. The Easter Controversy by Herbert Thurston 1913

8. The Story of the Swastika, article in the Popular Educator 1898

9. Oriental Religions and the Christian Holidays by Sir James George Frazer 1890

10. The Mysterious Swastika, article in Rays from the Rose Cross: A Magazine of Mystic Light 1920

11. The Goddess Easter in German Mythology by Wilhelm Zimmermann 1878

12. Was the Stauros of Christ in the Shape of a Cross? by John Denham Parsons 1896 

13. Dying and Rising Gods by J.M. Wheeler 1890

14. The Masculine Cross, or a History of Ancient and Modern Crosses and Their Connection with the Mysteries of Sex Worship

15. The Hare And Easter by J. Holden MacMichael 1906

16. Superstitions Concerning the Cross by William Wood Seymour 1898

17. Easter Superstitions by Cora Linn Daniels 1908

18. The Mystery-Names Iao And Jehovah, With Their Relation To The Cross And Circle

19. Easter Customs from Lancashire and Northern England By Charles Hardwick 1872

20.  The Sign of the Cross by Alexander Hislop 1862  

21. The Lenten and Easter Fires by James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. 1919

22. Iatro-Theurgic Symbolism by Roswell Parker M. D., LL.D. (Yale) 1912

23. Good Friday: A Chronological Mistake By James Gall 1882

24. Why You Should Not Reverence or Make Use of a Cross, by Presbuteros 1870

25. The Early Church Fathers and the Cross by Henry Dana Ward 1871

26. The Legend of the Egg by Keziah Shelton 1895

27. The Composition Of The True Cross by Frederick William Hackwood 1901

28. Easter and its Customs by J.M. Wheeler 1896

29. Visions of the Cross in the Sky by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer 1894


30. Easter in Nature By C. H. A. Bjerregaard 1909

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Saturday, February 25, 2017

Adams Two Wives by George St. Clair 1907 (Lilith)

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THE time-honoured personage whom we speak of as the first man is referred to in one genealogy as a son of the Deity; and cannot, in any view, be regarded as an ordinary mortal. Josephus says: "This man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth compounded together; for of that kind is virgin and true earth." Josephus, however, was not inspired. Fuerst, in his Hebrew lexicon, is disposed to disregard the suggestion of redness, and to derive the name from Adamah, the firm ground. Either way, Adam is associated with the earth: and in the idea of many nations the Earth itself is Divine.

In Egypt the personage called Seb is frequently figured lying on the ground, his limbs covered with leaves. In documents and monuments of priestly origin he appears as the personified earth; and he is called the Earth-God. Yet his name denotes "time" and "star"; besides which the number five has the phonetic value Seb. It can hardly be accidental that he is made the instrument for adding five days to the year of 360 days, to complete the measure of time. It appears that formerly the year had consisted of only 360 days; and of course the calendar was liable to get into confusion, and a remedy was looked for. It is affirmed by Herodotus that the Egyptians possessed a year of twelve months containing thirty days each, and that they added five complementary days to complete the tale. These five days were not distributed among the months, but were brought in at the end of the year as a "little month." They were dedicated to certain divinities, were called the birthdays of those divinities, and were kept as holidays. The Egyptians themselves tell the story in symbolic language, and invest it with poetry; for it was not the manner of the ancients to record sacred events in plain prose. Everything connected with the measurement of time and the accuracy of the calendar was sacred in their eyes, because it was concerned with bringing earthly usage into harmony with heavenly law. Unless they knew the times and seasons they could not observe the religious festivals on the proper days, and the Gods would punish them for their neglect. Their agricultural operations would not be duly timed, and their crops would not prosper. The institution of a year of 365 days was a great step towards accuracy; and the story is poetically related as follows: The Sun-God Ra, having discovered that his wife Neith, the Goddess of the Heaven-circle, was secretly associating with Seb, laid a curse upon her, that no day should be available for the birth of her children. Thoth (or Hermes), however, loved her as well, and as he was the God of time-arrangements, he played draughts with the Moon-Goddess and won certain portions of time from her, enough to make five days more. Then the divine children were born-Osiris, Aroeris, Typhon, Isis and Nephthys-one on each of these days. The five days were the birthdays of the five Gods, and they are hardly distinguishable from the Gods themselves. They were not distributed among the months, but were kept apart and observed as holidays.

It is very curious that there should be certain resemblances between Seb the Earth-God and Adam, whose name connects him with the ground. Typhon and Osiris were rival brothers, like Cain and Abel. They married their sisters Nephthys and Isis; and in Rabbinic tradition, though not in Scripture, Cain and Abel married their twin sisters. Typhon murdered Osiris, but Osiris was avenged by his son Horus; who reigns at last securely in place of his father. It reminds us that Seth was given in compensation for Abel; though the parallel is not very close. But what strikes us chiefly in these ancient traditions-if any general parallel was ever intended-is that Adam corresponds to Seb, and Seb is associated with the year of 360 days. This correspondence would perhaps lead the Jewish Rabbins to relate concerning Adam the same things that were told of Seb. At all events they have handed down certain traditions which fit into the astronomical story very well when they are interpreted symbolically.

The year of 360 days cannot have continued long without a supplement. In the space of six years the calendar would be out of accord with the seasons by a full month, and in thirty-six years summer and winter would be reversed. It was convenient, no doubt, to have twelve months of thirty days each; and so convenient to have a circle of 360 degrees that from that day to this it has never been altered. But may there not have been some device of intercalaries? An extra month every sixth year would keep the reckoning as near to accuracy as an addition of five days to every year. On the supposition that such a lunar supplement was given to the Adam year to render it complete, it would be quite in accord with ancient eastern speech to describe it as a companion with whom the man consorted.

In my Myths of Greece, I have shown that Artemis is a divinity who represents a calendar arrangement of this very kind, an extra month brought in at intervals, to make perfect the year of Zeus. The festival of Artemis appears to have been a holiday month in the 120th year, to compensate for an annual omission of one quarter of a day : but the principle of the device was the same. In Egypt the corresponding festival was held in honour of the Goddess Bubastis or Pasht; and part of the ceremony consisted in recognising her relation to Time, by offering to her the clepsydra or water-clock. Naville, the Egyptologist, describing the Festival Hall in the Temple of Bubastis, says that "this offering of the clepsydra is one of the most frequent in these inscriptions: it certainly had some reference to the astronomical meaning of the festival and to its coincidence with a date of the calendar."

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Pasht of Egypt may have been the divinity whom the Jewish Rabbins had in mind when they framed their stories about Adam's first wife. They say that Adam, while in Paradise, was fascinated by Lilith, and lived with her for 130 years before he married Eve. The statue of Pasht had the head of a cat or a catlike animal; and the ruins of Tel Basta, where the Goddess had her temple, have been found to contain a cemetery of cats. Many other Egyptian divinities had animal heads-the jackal, ibis, hawk, crocodile, etc.--and the symbolism is not difficult to understand. The months of the year were of course correlated with the divisions of the Zodiac, which had animal signs; and the divinities were associated with these. The Goddess Sekhet was lion-headed, because she was associated with the month and sign Leo, the "house " of the sun at midsummer. The Pasht month, we may assume, received the sign of the Cat - or, as Naville thinks, "the wild cat or a kind of lynx" -because it was intercalated as a second lion. In any case there is no doubt about the association of the cat with the lion on the one hand and the moon on the other. It is fabled that Noah passed his hand over the back of the lion, the animal sneezed, and the cat came forth from its nostrils. According to Plutarch, a cat placed in a sistrum denoted the moon. Ovid calls the cat the sister of the moon; and says that Pasht took the form of a cat to avoid Typhon.

Adam's first charmer, Lilith, has the same clear relationship with the moon, and, therefore, with the intercalary month and festival; though this has not hitherto been recognised. In the Rabbinic tradition, Lilith was the queen of the female demons. She is pictured with wings and long, flowing hair; she delighted in wild gambols, and is called "the evil dancer." If etymology is any clue to her character-as it appears to be in the case of Eve--she is the spirit of the Night, for the word Lilah means night. Evil things are said of her, especially that she sustains herself on the life of infants, whom she slays at night. The company she keeps seems to be quite consonant with this propensity: Isaiah (xxxiv. 14) couples her with howling creatures prowling among ruins. Rabbi Jose warned people not to go out unattended at night, especially on Wednesdays and Sabbaths, "for then Lilith haunts the air with her train of wicked spirits."

This, then, is a first approximation to a knowledge of the character of Lilith: she is a baleful spirit of the night hours, a sort of Hecate-the Greek lunar Goddess, of whom some dreadful things are told.

But the Moon-Goddess may also be regarded as a charming Diana-"Queen and huntress, chaste and fair." According to the Kabalistic Rabbins, Lilith assumed the form of a beautiful woman, and deceived Adam, becoming his wife on the night before his reception of Eve. Such stories have seemed to be only idle tales while we had no clue to the allegory, but if they are traditions of a time when the year of 360 days received an occasional extra month as its complementary, they record a fact of ancient history. The horror and the beauty which seem contradictory in Lilith are reconciled when we remember that the influences of Night may be either beneficial or hurtful. The heathen were superstitious and invoked the Goddess Lucina when women were in labour.

The Jews employ charms against Lilith to this day; and it is believed in Palestine that she sometimes takes the form of a cat, and is addicted to stealing new-born babes. Some curious instances are given in a paper on folk-lore in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July, 1904. Lilith is called La Broosha by Spanish Jewesses, and El Karineh by the fellahin: she is a demon who comes in the shape of a great black cat, and she steals new-born babes. This is what great Pasht, the Goddess of Bubastis, has come to, degenerating with the ignorant! Modern folk-lore is often the irrational debris of ancient myth; and the myth, in its first form, was perfectly rational symbolical teaching.

Here, then, we seem to have the meaning of Adam's dalliance with Lilith before he married Eve. In the symbolic terms of the ancient legend, this alliance records the fact that the expultion from the primitive circle or garden had been preceded by some ill-advised association of Sun and Moon in primitive worship and calendar-making. The priests were astronomers; and all calendar-making was an ecclesiastical and religious business, an earnest endeavour to learn the exact rule of the heavens, and bring the routine of human life into accord with it.

Lilith, as Goddess of an intercalary month supplementing the year of 360 days, belongs to a temporary arrangement; and as the system was fruitful of evils she fell into disrepute and was discarded. The next arrangement, in Egypt and elsewhere, was to give five "additional days" to every year, instead of waiting six years or more and then intercalating a month or more. The Rabbins would be acquainted with the legend which made these five days to be the birthdays of five divinities, the offspring of Seb and Neith ; and, as they had already likened Adam to the Earth-God, they would proceed to assimilate Eve to the Heaven-Goddess. Eve, the "mother of all living," must be viewed as the mother of five children, bringing five more days into the year. Seb and Neith had two sons, Typhon and Osiris; and Typhon murdered Osiris, as Cain killed Abel. The two Egyptian brothers had twin sisters, whom they married; and Rabbinic tradition tells the same story about Cab and Abel. Thus we have four out of the five: but about the remaining one there is something so peculiar in the Egyptian account, that the Jewish Rabbins may have felt at a loss for an exact parallel. In the Egyptian story the fifth child is Horus : but in one version he is a son of Osiris and Isis, in another there is an "elder Horus," brother of Osiris and Isis, born on one of the five days. The Rabbinic story also varies, sometimes giving two wives to Abel, and sometimes making the total number of children more than five. In any case the Rabbinic legend connects Lilith with the year of 360 days, and makes Eve the mother of the additional five. Lilith precedes Eve, and is discarded. The earlier arrangement represents Paradise, a state of primitive simplicity which did not last. It is said by some that Adam and Eve were not married till after the expulsion ; as it is plainly declared that the birth of Cain and Abel was later.

In the end of the story, as we have it in Milton, it is very pathetic to read how Adam and Eve, when expelled from the happy garden, looked back and dropped some natural tears: yet they wiped them soon. The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest; and

They, hand in hand, with wandering step and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Tradition follows them to Ceylon or elsewhere, but we will not now pursue the subject further. - GEO. ST. CLAIR.

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Friday, February 24, 2017

The Yellow Press - The Fake News of the Past by Sydney Brooks 1911


The Yellow Press - The Fake News of the Past by Sydney Brooks 1911

The late Mr. Joseph Pulitzer was unquestionably one of the most remarkable personalities of latter-day America. Indomitable by nature, of quick, unshackled perceptions, passionate to learn and to experiment, and with a strong vein of idealism running through his lust for power and success and domination, he was fortunate in the fate that landed him, forty-seven years ago, in Boston when America was on the very point of plunging into the most amazing era of material development and exploitation that the world has yet witnessed. The penniless son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, young Pulitzer shifted from one occupation to another before he finally found his life-work in journalism. He was a soldier, a steamboat stoker on the Mississippi, a teamster, and, some say, a hackman and a waiter by turns before he became a reporter on a St. Louis newspaper. Once in journalism his daring and imagination and his avidity to master every detail of his profession quickly carried him to the front. He bought a St. Louis evening paper and converted it into the Post-Despatch, working it up into one of the most influential journals and most valuable newspaper properties in the Middle West. In 1883 he purchased from Jay Gould the New York World, and almost to the day of his death, in spite of long absences and the appalling affliction of blindness, he remained its director and inspiration. Under his dashing guidance the World became the most fearless, the most independent, the most powerful, and also the most sensational journal in the United States. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday Mr. Pulitzer sent a message to his staff in which he embodied his conception of a great newspaper: "An institution which should always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; never belong to any party; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy with the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." And in a codicil to his will, published on November 15th, he reiterated his journalistic ideals in the form of a last request and admonition to his sons: "I particularly enjoin on my sons and descendants the duty of preserving, perfecting, and perpetuating the World newspaper, to the maintenance and publishing of which I have sacrificed my health and strength, in the same spirit in which I have striven to create and conduct it as a public institution from motives higher than mere gain, it having been my desire that it should be at all times conducted in a spirit of independence and with a view to inculcating high standards and public spirit among the people and their official representatives; and it is my earnest wish that the said newspaper shall hereafter be conducted on the same principles." These are high professions of faith, and the World in many ways has not fallen below them. Time and again Mr. Pulitzer risked popularity and gain and offended many powerful interests rather than compromise where he thought compromise to be wrong. Often reckless, prejudiced, and unfair in his onslaughts, he nevertheless rendered many public services, withstood the clamour of the hour at more than one fateful crisis, and preserved inviolate and incorruptible his ideal of independence. He was a man of real public spirit and of genuine political instinct, and the large sums he devoted to establishing a school of journalism in Columbia College bore witness to a pride in his profession to which no member of it can be indifferent. In his own distinctive phosphorescent way he meant to be, and was, a force for righteousness.

It is probable, however, that when the memory of his individuality has faded, Mr. Pulitzer will be chiefly remembered as the Father of the Yellow Press, or, at any rate, as the man who, if he did not originate yellow journalism, so greatly extended it as to make it appear his own invention, and who, if he left some of its least creditable excesses to others, was for long its best known and most pyrotechnical practitioner. In that capacity his practice did not always square with his principles. There is no more vigorous or higher-minded journal in the United States than Collier's Weekly. In paying tribute to Mr. Pulitzer's memory and in emphasising the vastness of the opportunity open to his sons and successors, that admirable organ recently remarked: "Upon them is the burden of showing originality and strength, like their father, but of applying those qualities to a changing era. The forward spirit that he showed in attacking social feudalism, they will find themselves called upon to apply to the pressing task of helping to take graft and falsehood out of journalism itself. He never cared to do his share toward removing the loan shark and the patent-medicine poisoner by forbidding them the use of his own columns. The news also needs to be treated with more responsibility. We will give an instance from a recent day. A young stenographer, passing from a street car to her home a block away after nightfall, felt a man's fingers clinch about her neck, and when she reached her hands towards the fingers she found that they were very large. Twenty minutes later the girl's mother found her on the sidewalk, weeping hysterically, and able to remember only that she had been strangled. Next day in the Evening World it was stated on the authority of an examining physician that the girl's skull was fractured, her jaw broken, her breasts, face and arms terribly bitten, 'as a mad dog might have torn the victim of an infuriated attack,' and her body covered with bruises from blows struck by a club of which the girl cried out deliriously; lusty bloodhounds led a horde of officers in uniform and a score of detectives across the countryside. Actually there were no bloodhounds, no pursuing policemen in uniform, no bites, no fractured skull, no broken jaw, no body bruises, and no club. As Joseph Pulitzer served his generation in his own direction, so his sons, we are sure, will serve a later generation in the light of present morals." This willingnesss to sport with the facts and to insist on extracting "a thrill" from every incident is one of the distinctive characteristics of the Yellow Press. The World has been by no means immune from it. I remember reading in its columns a long interview with Mr. Pierpont Morgan of a most sensational character, and admirably contrived to embitter the working man against the capitalists. Mr. Morgan's inaccessibility to journalists is notorious, and the statements he was alleged to have made were of a kind to stamp the whole interview as a concoction from beginning to end. In a subsequent issue, when the damage had been done, the World acknowledged that it had been "imposed upon." At the same time, and side by side with its retraction, it published a series of comments on the alleged interview from a number of newspapers — a proceeding that might well have been taken as the text for a lecture in Mr. Pulitzer's School of Journalism.

To put the American Yellow Press in its proper light, one must remember that journalism, while a giant, is a very young one. In its present form it is the product of a quick succession of astounding inventions. The railway, the cable, the telegraph, the telephone, the rotary press, the linotype, the manufacture of paper from wood-pulp, and colour-printing — these are the discoveries of yesterday that have made the journal of to-day possible. We are still too near to the phenomenon to be able to assess its significance, or to determine its relations to the general scheme of things. Journalism still awaits its philosopher: awaits, I mean, someone who will work out the action and reaction of this new and tremendous power of organised, ubiquitous publicity upon human life. It has already, to all appearances, taken its place among the permanent social forces; we see it visibly affecting pretty nearly all we do and say and think, competing with the churches, superseding parliaments, elbowing out literature, rivalling the schools and universities, furnishing the world with a new set of nerves; yet nobody that I am aware of has yet attempted to trace out its consequences, to define its nature, functions, and principles, or to establish its place and prerogatives by the side of those other forces, religion, law, art, commerce, and so on, that, unlike journalism, infused the ancient as well as the modern world. Journalism is young, and the problems propounded by the necessity of adjusting it to society and the State have so far been hardly formulated. Its youth must be its excuse for whatever flaws and excesses it has developed. The Yellow Press, as I view the matter, is a disorder of infancy and not of decrepitude; it is a sort of journalistic scarlet fever, and will be cured in time. And there are many reasons why it should have fastened upon America with particular virulence. Journalism there has run through three main phases. There was first, the phase in which a paper was able to support itself by its circulation alone, in which advertisements were a minor consideration, and in which the editor, by his personality, his opinions, and his power of stating them, was the principal factor. But the day of the supremacy of the leading article perished soon after the Civil War, and there set in the era — it is just beginning with us — when the important thing was not opinion but news, and when the advertisers became the chief source of newspaper profits. Speaking broadly, the centre of the power of the Press in the United States has shifted from the editorial to the news columns. Its influence is not on that account less operative, but it is, I should judge, less tangible and personal and more diffused, dependent, that is to say, less on editorial comment than on the skill shown in collecting the news of the day and in presenting it in a form that will express particular views and policies. The ordinary American journal of to-day serves up the events of the preceding twenty-four hours from its own point of view, coloured by its own prepossessions and affiliations, and the most effective propagandism for or against a given measure or man is thus carried on continuously, by a multitude of little strokes, in the news columns, and particularly in the headlines attached to them. Now the Americans have always taken a liberal, if not a licentious, view of the kind of news that ought to be printed. In a somewhat raw, remote, free and easy community, impressed with the idea of social equality, absorbed in the work of laying the material foundations of a vast civilisation, eminently sociable and inquisitive but with comparatively few social traditions and almost no settled code of manners, it was natural enough that the line between private and public affairs should be loosely drawn. Moreover, the Americans have never enjoyed anything like the severity of our own libel laws. The greater the truth the greater the libel is not a maxim of American law. On the contrary, a statement, if published without malice, is held to be justifiable so long as it can be shown to be true. Attempts have been made in some States to elevate a published retraction into a sufficient defence in a suit for libel, and to invest a reporter's "copy " with the halo of "privileged communication." Then, again, there is nothing in America that at all corresponds to our law of contempt of court. An American paper is entitled to anticipate the probable findings of a judge and jury, to take sides in any case that happens to interest it, to comment on and to garble the evidence from day to day, to work up sympathy for or against the prosecutor or defendant, and to proclaim its conviction of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner from the first moment of his arrest and without waiting for the tiresome formality of the verdict. Hardly an issue, indeed, appears of even the most reputable organs in the United States, such as the New York Sun, The Times, and the Evening Post, that would not land its publisher and editor in prison if the English law of contempt of court obtained in America.

Conditions such as these favoured from the first the species of journalism which the world has agreed to designate as yellow. When James Gordon Bennett, for instance, started the New York Herald, he specifically, as he himself said in his salutatory, "renounced all so-called principles." He set out to find the news and to print it first; the more private and personal it was the better. He was more than once horse-whipped in the streets of New York. But that did little good. Bennett's reply was to bring out a flaming "extra" with a full account of the incident written in his own pungent English. The more he was horse-whipped the more papers he sold. From the success of the New York Herald may be dated that false conception of what news is, of the methods that may be employed in getting it, and of its importance to a newspaper that has since permeated nearly all American journalism. Mr. Pultizer and Mr. Hearst have in reality done little more than to devote inexhaustible ingenuity, wealth, and enterprise to working the soil which Mr. Bennett long ago was the first to break. But their form of cultivation has been so intensive as to constitute by itself the third of the three phases through which American journalism has thus far passed! The Yellow Press existed long before it was christened. It was not, indeed, until 1895, when Mr. Hearst came to New York intent on beating Mr. Pulitzer on his own ground and by his own weapons, that the type of journalism which emerged from their resounding conflict was labelled "yellow." As a mere uninitiated Englishman, resident at that time in New York, it seemed to me a contest of madmen for the primacy of a sewer. Sprawling headlines, the hunting down of criminals by imaginative reporters, the frenzied demand for their reprieve when caught and condemned, interviews that were "fakes" from the first word to the last, the melodramatisation of the follies of the Four Hundred, columns of gossip and scandal that could only have emanated from stewards in the fashionable clubs or maids and butlers in private houses, sympathetic reports from feminine pens of murder, divorce, and breach of promise cases with a sob in every line, every incident of the day tortured to yield the pure juice of emotionalism beloved of the servants' hall — such was the week-day fare provided by the Yellow Press in those ebullient days. On Sundays it was much worse. It is on Sunday that the American papers, yellow and otherwise, put forth their finest efforts and produce their most flamboyant effects. The Sunday edition of a New York daily is a miscellany of from sixty to eighty pages that in mere wood-pulp represents a respectable plantation and that would carpet a fair-sized room. Of all its innumerable features the most distinctively yellow is the comic supplement printed in colours. Nothing better calculated to kill the American reputation for humour has ever been conceived. It is a medley of knock-about facetiousness, through which week after week march a number of types and characters — Happy Hooligan, Frowsy Freddy, Weary Willie, Tired Tim, and so on — whose adventures and sayings make up a world that resembles nothing so much as a libellous vision of the cheapest music hall seen in a nightmare by a madman. And among the other attractions of these Sunday editions you will usually find a page or two given up to the doings and photographs of those preposterous actors and actresses who are so woefully smaller than the art they practise; and another page, fully illustrated, to society news and scandal; and a third page, and, with luck, a fourth, to the latest crime. The Yellow Press has consistently specialized in crime. I recall a famous issue of one paper that described and illustrated a hundred different ways of killing a man; and, indeed, a would-be criminal could hardly hope for a better school in which to master the theory of his profession. Pictures of men in masks in the act of blowing open a safe, of an embezzling cashier stepping on to the train for Mexico, of a drunken man assaulting his wife with a bootjack, of a youth drowning a girl he has betrayed, reproductions of the faces of murderers, of the rooms in which and the weapons with which their crimes were committed, precise and detailed descriptions of the latest swindling trick or embezzlement device or confidence game — even, in one case, I remember, a column and a half of exact information on the construction of an infernal machine and the best way of packing it so as to avoid detection in the post office — these are the aids with which the Yellow Press strews the path of the budding burglar, thief, and criminal.

But perhaps its greatest offence is its policy of perverting the truth in the interest of a mere tawdry sensationalism, of encouraging the American people to look for a thrill in every paragraph of news, of feeding them on a diet of scrappy balderdash. This habit of digging away for what is emotionally picturesque and "popular" has infected almost the whole of the American daily Press. Only a few months ago a professor of moral philosophy at Harvard was bewailing how egregiously he had been victimised by this policy. He was delivering an address at a girls' college in Boston on the higher education of women, and in the course of it he mentioned the case of a girl-student who had become so absorbed in her work as to lose all interest in social diversions. Her parents and friends pressed her to slacken off for a year or so and devote more time to balls and luncheons and so on. She came to him, the professor, for advice, and he counselled her to do as she was urged. "Flirt," he said, "flirt hard and show that a college girl is equal to whatever is required of her." The professor, as I said, in the course of his address, which took about a hour to deliver, recalled this incident. He did not dwell on it; he made no other reference to it whatever; he said nothing at all about the place that flirtation should hold in a properly organised curriculum. That same evening a Boston paper came out with a report of his "Address on Flirtation." The next day he was asked for but declined an interview on the subject. The interview, however, appeared, a column of imaginative literature, generously adorned with headlines and quotation marks, setting forth in the gayest of colours his "advocacy of flirtation." The professor, not being an ardent newspaper reader, did not realise what had happened until there suddenly began to rain upon him a succession of solemn or derisive editorials, letters from distressed parents, abusive post cards, and leaflets from societies for the prevention of vice with the significant passages marked. The bubble grew and grew; "symposia" were held by scores of papers on whether girls should flirt; the topic raged over the continent; and it soon became a settled conviction in the minds of some ninety million people, who at once proceeded to denounce his hoary depravity, that the professor of moral philosophy at Harvard was advocating a general looseness in the relations of the sexes. And that is the sort of buffoonery to which any man who opens his mouth in public in the United States is inevitably exposed.

But not all of the enormities of the Yellow Press were of their own commission. They fostered an appetite for sensationalism, and all sorts of news-bureaus and Press agencies came into existence to gratify it. More than once the yellow journals found themselves hoist with their own petard and tricked into publishing incidents that had never the slightest basis in fact. It is on record, for example, that the editor of one of these news agencies conceived one day a wonderfully plausible story of an attempted suicide in a fashionable doctor's office, the would-be suicide being rescued only by the timely intervention of the doctor. The thing never happened, but it might have happened, and he sat down and wrote a realistic account of it. This account he handed to a girl on his reporters' staff, telling her to take it to some prominent doctor and convince him of the numberless advantages, the prodigious advertisement, that would accrue to him if only he would endorse the tale. The first doctor she approached said he could stand a good deal in the way of exaggeration, but that he was not yet educated up to the point of swearing to the truth of a story that was an absolute lie. The second, a physician known all over New York, bundled her out of the house in double-quick time. At the third attempt she was successful. She found a doctor, and a well-known one, too, who was delighted with the idea, and gladly closed with her proposal. They went over his consulting room together; the cord with which the patient had tried to strangle herself during the momentary absence of the doctor, the lounge to which she was removed, the restoratives applied, were all agreed upon. The story was then sent out to the newspaper offices; the doctor, being appealed to by the reporters, confirmed it in every detail; and it appeared in the next morning's papers, three-quarters of a column of soul-moving narrative, with the doctor's photograph and a sketch of his consulting room, and this final paragraph: "Owing to the urgent pleadings of the lady, Dr. refuses to give the name and address of his patient, but says she belongs to one of the wealthiest and most exclusive social circles in the city." On the whole it would not be easy to conceive a deeper abyss of infamy.

It sometimes happened that the ingenuity of the sensation-mongers was wasted. When Mr. Henry Miller, for instance, was about to make his first appearance in New York as a star in a new play he received the following letter from the editor of one of these news bureaus: "Dear Sir,—You are probably aware that nowadays it is sensation and not talent that wins. As you are to make your first stellar appearance in New York, it is almost necessary that you do something to attract attention, and I have a scheme to propose. On Sunday night your house will be entered by burglars. They will turn the place upside down, and upon discovery pistol-shots will be fired. They will escape, leaving blood-stains upon the floor. You will get the credit of fighting single-handed two desperate robbers. The New York Herald and the other morning dailies will get the story and the whole town will be talking about you. I will furnish the burglars and take all chances, and will only charge $100 dollars for the scheme." Mr. Miller declined the offer, but it is amazing to discover whither the passion for advertisement in that land of advertisement will lead people. I remember seeing in a New York paper a long article describing a house of Pompeian design, built of glass bricks and glass columns of all colours, that was to be erected at Newport for a Western millionaire by a well-known firm of city architects, whose name and address were given and who supplied the paper with interior and exterior plans of the projected building. It turned out that no such freak was ever contemplated, and that the architects, for such advertisement as it would give them, and the reporter, hungering for a sensation, had concocted the tale between them. To the same genesis, I should say, may be ascribed a paragraph about a chiropodist who announced that he had replaced a missing toe with one of solid gold. The weapon which the Yellow Press had forged was, in short, turned against them. There were cases in which conspiracies were formed between reporters and unscrupulous outsiders to procure the insertion of paragraphs and articles on which a libel action could be based against the papers publishing them. There were cases, too, in which the reporters who were detailed on some special mission — say, to interview the jurymen after a famous murder trial — would get together, ignore the refusal of the jurymen to be interviewed, and write out, each in his own style, what they ought to have said. There is really something more than jest in the old remark that Shakespeare would never have suited a New York newspaper; he had not sufficient imagination.

But the Yellow Press is not al1 evil and inanity. It has its virtues and its usefulness. The calculation which was the base of Mr. Hearst's invasion of New York was this. He added up the figures of the circulation of all the New York papers and compared them with the census returns of population. He found that there was a large number of people in New York who apparently never read, or at any rate never bought, a paper at all. These were the people he set out to cater for, and it is undoubtedly one of the merits of the Yellow Press that it has forced people to read who never read before. That, it may be said, is not rendering much of a  service to the community if the type of reading was such as I have described. Well I think that is arguable. In the first place, not all the columns of the Yellow Press, even in its yellowest days, were filled with the frivolities and slush I have touched on; and in the second place, Mr. W. Irwin, who has contributed this year a brilliant series of articles to Collier's Weekly on American journalism, notes the very interesting fact that Mr. Hearst's papers, which one may take as fairly representative of the Yellow Press, appear to change their clientele once every seven or eight years. From this Mr. Irwin comfortably infers that in general the more a man reads the better he reads. Once implant a taste for reading and the odds are that it will unconsciously improve itself, and will in time come to discard the tenth-rate in favour of the ninth-rate. Those who begin with Mr. Hearst's organs gradually find them out, grow disgusted, and desire something better. Sounder standards are thus in process of evolution all the time, and even the Yellow Press is affected by them and finds it to its interest to conform to them. Then, too, the Yellow Press attempts so much and covers such a wide field of life that some of its enterprises, by the mere law of averages, are bound to be beneficent. The New York American, for instance, in its news as well as its editorial columns has always paid special attention to matters of public health and domestic hygiene and the rearing of children and the care of the sick. In its own peculiar way, I should say it has sincerely tried to civilise its readers and make them think. Its columns have been the means of remedying hundreds of little injustices to the poor. A reader of the American or of the Evening Journal who is oppressed by his landlord or by the police, finds in his favourite paper a ready champion of his wrongs. The American is constantly risking the patronage of its advertisers by fighting drink and cigarettes. It is prolific of semi-philanthropic activities. At the time of the Galveston flood and the San Francisco earthquake Mr. Hearst sent three full trains of provisions, clothing, medicines, doctors, and nurses across the Continent. The American conducts an admirable fresh-air fund; it takes a hundred children from the tenements every day throughout the summer for a day's outing at the seaside; it offers each year a two-weeks' vacation to the entire family having the largest number of children in the New York public schools; it distributes free ice in summer and free soup in winter and cartloads of toys at Christmas time; it is a newspaper, an adult kindergarten, and a charitable institution rolled into one. In the last Sunday edition that I happened to see, along with the comic supplement and plenty of inane gossip, I found an admirable article by d'Annunzio on the Italian expedition to Tripoli, and a very well-written and well-illustrated page given up to a popular digest of one of Reclus' works on anthropology. The Yellow Press gets most of what is bad in life into its columns but it does not exclude what is better. There is usually something to be found in itthat is really instructive, and presented in a simple and stimulating fashion. It displays, of course, no sense of proportion. whatever in arranging its news and in deciding between what is of real and permanent interest and what is merely and vulgarly ephemeral; the Christmas edition of a typical Yellow journal might easily print on one page Milton's Ode on the Nativity and on the next several columns of sketches and letter-press commenting on and illustrating the various styles of walking to be seen on Fifth Avenue among the members of the Four Hundred; but it is not irredeemably degrading.

But, besides all this, the Yellow Press in Mr. Pulitzer's and Mr. Hearst's hands has rendered some real public services. While most of the American daily papers in the big cities are believed to be under the influence of the "money power" and controlled by "the interests," the Yellow journals have never failed to flay the rich perverter of public funds and properties, the rich gambler in fraudulent consolidations, and the far-reaching oppressiveness of that alliance between organised wealth and debased politics which dominates America. They daily explain to the masses how they are being robbed by the Trusts, juggled with by the politicians, and betrayed by their elected officers. They unearth the iniquities of a great corporation with the same microscopic diligence that they squander on following up the clues in a murder mystery or on collecting or inventing the details of a society scandal. Their motives may be dubious and their methods wholly brazen, but it is undeniable that the public has benefited by many of their achievements. The, American criminal, whether he is of the kind that steals a public franchise or corrupts a legislature, or of the equally common but more frequently caught and convicted kind that rifles a safe or kidnaps a child, fears the Yellow Press far more than he fears the police or the public. Both Mr. Hearst and the late Mr. Pulitzer have not only saved millions of dollars to the public, but have fought a stimulating fight far democracy against plutocracy and privilege. The Yellow Press, in short, has proved a fearless and efficient instrument for the exposure of public wrongdoing. The political power which Mr. Hearst has built up on the basis of his Continental chain of journals represents something more than cheek and a cheque-book, pantomime and pandemonium. What gives him his ultimate influence is that he has used the resources of an unlimited publicity to make himself and his propaganda the rallying centre for disaffection and unrest. With more point and passion and pertinacity than any other agency, his papers have stood for the people against the plutocracy, and for trade unions against capital, have assailed the "money power" and its control over the instruments of Government, have let daylight into the realities of American conditions, and have given pointed and constant expression to that weariness with the regular parties which is now pretty nearly a national sentiment. Daily expounded by Mr. Arthur Brisbane in the columns of the New York Evening Journal in a sharp, staccato, almost monosyllabic style of unsurpassable crispness, lucidity, and plausibility, set off with a coruscation of all known typographical devices, the Hearst creed and the Hearst programme have powerfully affected the imagination of the American, or at any rate the New York masses. There is no stranger or more instructive experience than to get on a subway train in New York during the hours of the evening homeward rush and watch the labourer in his overalls, the tired shop-girl, and the pallid clerk reading and re-reading Mr. Brisbane's "leader" for the day. He has, I suppose, a wider audience than any writer or preacher has had before. Always fresh and pyrotechnical, master of the telling phrase and the capitivating argument, and veiling the dexterous half-truth behind a drapery of buoyant and "popular" philosophy and sentiment, Mr. Brisbane has every qualification that an insinuating preacher of discontent should have. He, at any rate, has made the masses think — no man more so; the leading article in his hands has lost all its stodginess and restrictions, and become a vital and all-embracing instrument. That is something which would have to be borne in mind if one were to attempt the interesting but very serious task of estimating the influence of the Yellow Press on the American mind and character, and of determining how far it is responsible for, and how far the outcome of, the volatility and empiricism, the hysterical restlessness and superficiality, and the incapacity for deep and sustained thinking that have been noted in the American people. It seems hardly possible that even America should not pay something for its Yellow Press. I believe, however, that it is called upon to pay less and less as the years go on, and that the worst and most reckless days of yellow journalism are over.

William J. Burns, America's "Sherlock Holmes" 1916


William J. Burns, America's "Sherlock Holmes", article in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography 1916

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BURNS, William John, detective, was born in Baltimore, Md., Oct. 19, 1861, son of Michael and Bridget (Trahey) Burns. While he was still a child his parents moved to Ohio, settling first at Zanesville and in 1873 at Columbus, where his father engaged in business as a merchant tailor. After a public school education William attended a business college in Columbus and then joined his father in the merchant tailoring business. But his remarkable talents soon pointed the way to a very different vocation. When his father became police commissioner of Columbus young Burns eagerly grasped the opportunity of gratifying his taste and exercising his talent for criminal investigation. Though he was never officially connected with the police department of Columbus he was for a time practically the brains of its detective branch, and time and again his unerring genius lighted the way for the perplexed police officials through the dark ages of seemingly impossible problems. His fame in this respect grew so quickly and widely that when the famous tally-sheet forgeries occurred in Ohio in 1885 and the methods of the best trained investigators resulted in absolute failure he was called upon to take up the investigation by the prosecuting attorney, Cyrus Huling. His efforts were crowned with complete success, and this achievement attracted so much notice that many of the largest corporations in Ohio eagerly sought his services as a detective. In the year 1889 Mr. Burns was asked to join the United States secret service, and was appointed to the headquarters at St. Louis, Mo. Five years later he was promoted to the Washington office. The United States secret service has charge of all kinds of crimes against the United States government, except those within the scope of the post office, which maintains its own detective service. Its work includes the pursuit of criminals in general, search for counterfeiters, investigations of customs frauds, defalcations in national banks, dishonesty of government employees—-in fact every kind of detective work required in the investigation of offenses against the Federal statutes. The advent of William J. Burns in the United States secret service marked the beginning of a notable epoch in its history. Never before, even in the picturesque days of the civil war, did the secret service attract so much public attention as it did when the mind of the remarkable detective set to work on its big problems, and never before outside of fiction was the public regaled with such brilliant feats of investigation as he accomplished. Even the dry newspaper accounts of his exploits read like the imaginative pages of Poe, Gaboriau and Conan Doyle

Indeed, Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective of fiction, never handled problems of such magnitude and nation-wide importance as did William J. Burns, the greatest detective of fact, and those he did handle were worked with more frills but less brilliancy. It is putting it mildly to say that William J. Burns was the star of the secret service; John E. Wilkie, the present head of the department, referred to him as the best detective he ever knew; and press and public have been practically unanimous in acclaiming him the greatest of all detectives. Many of the high cases handled by Burns are part of the history of the country. The celebrated Costa Rican case is one of these. In 1896 De Requesons, De Costa and others undertook to foment a revolution in Costa Rica and began operations by counterfeiting the currency of that country in the United States. Their object was the double one of discrediting the monetary system of Costa Rica and acquiring funds with which to carry out their plans. Burns handled the difficult case throughout and obtained the evidence which sent both men to prison. Big as the case was it was entirely overshadowed by the famous Brockway case and the Monroehead silver $100 certificate case. Clever counterfeiters have always been about the most difficult game a detective can stalk, and Brockway was perhaps the cleverest of them all. He took a special course in chemistry at Harvard University for the special purpose of perfecting himself in that particular branch of his counterfeiting work. He was known to the government for over twenty-five years but the Federal authorities were always glad to compromise with him, every time he was arrested in return for the surrender of his plates. They never could obtain sufficient evldence to convict him and round up to his gang until Burns took hold of the case in 1894 and obtained the evidence which sent him and his gang to jail. So skillfully was the counterfeited Monroe-head silver $100 certificate printed that even the treasury experts were deceived and it was of vital importance that the printing of them should be stopped. Not the slightest clue to the identity of the counterfeiters was in the hands of the government and the mere task of establishing their identity was a stupendous one. Burns conducted the investigation with characteristic thoroughness. He looked up every engraving establishment in the country and made a list of all the expert engravers who could possibly have done such clever work. He obtained a list of plate makers and finally a list of those concerns that used the photo-mechanical process, and by elimination his suspicions were narrowed down to three men in Philadelphia, two of whom proved to be the culprits, Taylor and Bredell. 

A piece of remarkably clever detective work of an entirely different nature was his investigation of a lynching that occurred at Versailles, Ind., in 1897, when five prisoners were taken from the county jail and hanged or shot by a mob. Public opinion was aroused to such a high pitch that the local officers failed or refused to act and Gov. Mount of Indiana appealed to the Federal authorities for aid in enforcing the law. Because of the dangerous state of affairs Secretary Lyman J. Gage declined to assign any of his men on the case, but offered a leave of absence to Detective Burns if he would volunteer. Not long after he appeared on the scene in the guise of an insurance agent, and by associating with the natives and ingratiating himself in their good graces for a number of months, he succeeded in obtaining a list of the perpetrators of the crime with proofs which he turned over to the authorities. 

In 1903 he resigned from the secret service and was appointed by Secretary E. O. Hitchcock of the Interior Department to take charge of the investigation of the Oregon, Washington and California land fraud cases, which were probably the most gigantic swindle that has ever been attempted against the United States government. For years and years vast areas of valuable government lands in the far West had been systematically stolen by the thousands and millions of acres. The secretary of the interior had made several attempts to get at the bottom of the frauds, but his special agents were never able to solve the problem and in addition they were bought off and bribed by the rich and powerful men involved in the frauds. But Mr. Burns is no respector of persons. He follows his leads in the performance of his duties, no matter how high up they go. He pursues his investigations without fear or favor, and in this case his disclosures resulted in the prosecution and conviction of a number of Federal, state and city officials, including U. S. senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon. The prosecuting officer in the land fraud cases was Francis J. Heney, who was to come more prominently before the public in the graft prosecution in San Francisco, Cal. It was Mr. Heney's acquaintance with Mr. Burns and his knowledge of the latter's exceptional ability that prompted him to urge Mr. Burns to accept the offer from prominent citizens of San Francisco to gather the evidence in the latter case. After the completion of his work there Burns went to New York to complete the plan his son George E. Burns, now deceased, had long cherished of establishing a detective agency of his own. 

The William J. Burns National Detective Agency was organized in New York in 1909, and it at once took over the protection of the 12,000 bank members of the American Bankers' Association. Mr. Burns brought to the work the latest and most modern methods for preventing crime and apprehending criminals. His agency has branch offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Ga., Detroit, Mich., and Dallas, Tex., and employs a staff of over 600 men. 

It was shortly after his agency was organized that Mr. Burns was assigned the most difficult piece of work in his entire career, the successful outcome of which has given him a world-wide reputation and led the New York "Times" to characterize him as "the greatest detective certainly, and perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced." This was the discovery and apprehension of the labor union dynamiters in 1911, which terminated a seven-years' reign of terror in the building trades all over the United States. The Bridge and Structural Iron Workers' Union had demanded the closed shop and had instigated a strike to enforce those demands. The building employers held out for the open shop, and thereafter all kinds of iron structural work in process of building was attacked by dynamite, sometimes with loss of life. During the seven years hundreds of lives had been lost and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed as the result of these outrages. The climax of these attacks was the destruction of the Los Angeles "Times" building in 1910, when twenty-one men were killed. The mayor of Los Angeles sought the services of Mr. Burns. The Burns agency had already been retained to investigate a previous dynamite explosion occurring in some property under construction belonging to McClintic, Marshall & Co., at Peoria, 1ll. The outcome was the arrest of John J. McXamara, secretary and treasurer of the National Association of Structural Iron and Bridge Workers; his brother, James B. McNamara, and Ortie McManigal, and the revelation of a most shameful conspiracy against building concerns all over the country, traced to the very door of organized labor. His evidence was so overwhelming that McManigal confessed before trial and both McNamaras pleaded guilty. It was such an appalling mass of absolutely unimpeachable evidence that it created consternation in the ranks of the unions, and shortly after the confessions of the McNamaras a concerted movement was started to immediately call off all pending strikes among organized labor. 

Nothing has so stirred the American people since the civil war, and Mr. Burns won the everlasting gratitude of the entire nation for the thoroughness and fearlessness with which he laid bare the truth. Ex-President Roosevelt well expressed the sentiment of the American public on the conclusion of the Los Angeles case when he telegraphed to Mr. Burns: "All good American citizens feel that they owe you a debt of gratitude for your signal service to American citizenship." Personally Mr. Burns is affable and unassuming, with the general appearance of a prosperous and contented business man. No one would ever suspect his calling from his appearance. He is as far from the typical police detective as he is from the pale and penetrating Sherlock Holmes. But behind those external characteristics lies the unusual combination of attributes which have made him the greatest detective in the world. He is aggressive, dominating, assured, forceful and convincing, possessing dauntless courage, a remarkable mental alertness and the necessary self-assurance to carry him through any emergency. He has been successful as a great detective because he is in many respects a great character. There is probably no individual in the entire country with more inside information regarding municipal affairs, and he has been frequently called upon to deliver addresses in various cities of the country and before colleges on municipal problems of the day. He has addressed Columbia University, Ann Arbor University, and many other leading colleges, and has shown in his public addresses that he possesses oratorical ability of a high order.