Editorial of the Week

In San Francisco lately a motherly Christian Science practitioner had an obscure hotel clerk arrested for threatening her life in an excess of affection. A judge dismissed the complaint on condition that the accused man leave town. One day last fortnight the man disappeared from a coastwise steamer, left identical notes addressed to San Francisco newspapers. Few days later Hearst's Examiner editorialized:

"Just before Clifton M. Rogers, hotel clerk too much in love, ended his life he sat down and wrote:

" 'Statement to S. F. Examiner: I am tired of not making any money. And I am sorry for all the lies I have told and all the trouble I have caused a very dear little lady.'

"It is little occurrences of this sort which make a newspaper worker feel both proud and humble. Proud, to realize how earnestly folk in moments of stress turn toward the newspaper as a trustee of society; humble, to think how hard it is to live up to the responsibility thus imposed.

"The pages of a great modern newspaper are like a thoroughfare where walk thousands upon thousands of sad, merry, desperate, frivolous, austere human beings. . . . Here and there one will pause an instant and say something that touches the heart of even the most habituated builder of that thoroughfare, as when this poor man in the moment of death thought of the 'S. F. Examiner . . . and ... a very dear little lady.' "

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