THE LOW-WATER MARK by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 4, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 14.

“THE LOW-WATER MARK.”

By Editor

THAT is what the Catholic Mirror calls the colored supplement to the large Sunday editions of the daily papers. In part it says:

While the illustration of books and magazines has developed a high degree of artistic excellence, both in subject and treatment, the illustration of the daily papers—especially as it relates to the comic element,

on which these journals lay great stress—grows constantly worse in every particular; and the colored supplement denotes its low-water mark. . . .

Who has not watched, on a pleasant Sunday morning in some country village or watering-place, the arrival of the train or boat, bearing these fell messengers of a crude civilization? A crowd listlessly awaits their appearance, and when they come, the crowd becomes a mob for their possession. There is a distinct preference for the hideous yellow, red, green, and blue splotches which form the prevailing "color-schemes" of these corrupting sheets. Long before a merciful twilight comes with its effacing touch, the sidewalks, piazzas, the rustic seats, are strewn with these diseased windfalls of the press. It is impossible to describe the vulgarity and insanity of their drawing and coloring; and it can not be that the editors, who must be men of some ability, however devoid of scruples, approve of their own mischievous work. . . .

Even readers whose time is so valueless that they can afford to waste more than a glance at a Sunday paper must realize how worthless pictures of this sort really are. It is the children who suffer, for they absorb unconsciously the unsavory quality of such efforts to amuse, and are thus the involuntary victims of voluntary and responsible corruptionists. At a time when this country is seriously trying to impart knowledge of, and stimulate a taste for, better things, artistic and esthetic, through exhibitions in museums, libraries, and even in Sunday-schools, it is not a little disheartening to realize that every step in this direction gets a weekly setback through these colored atrocities.

We are the most humorous, if not the wittiest, people on earth, and yet we maintain the colored Sunday supplement, while other nations, the quality of whose humor is displayed in art incomparably better than ours, get along very comfortably without them.

And it is all true and more. The power of our much boasted "press" is often used to corrupt and vitiate taste, and hence morals.