Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/408

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382
HISTORY OF JOURNALISM

to report a railway wreck." "It wasn't necessary to report it at once; the facts would have come out at the investigation before the grand jury," I hear some distinguished graybeard of a jurist say. The man who feels that way, who thinks that way, does not know the American public. Whether it is in the crowded, congested section of the city, amid the clatter of push-carts and the din of the itinerant peddlers, or far away in the hills where the cowbell at evening echoes for miles, there is caught up, more than all the fulminations of the statesman, the spirit of the "game "—the spirit of sacrifice of the reporter Humes; the spirit that made America free and that has made her people trusting and confident.