Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1886 — Misdirected Fearlessness. [ARTICLE]

Misdirected Fearlessness.

Elkhart Beyiew: Some rural editors are always boasting that they are fearless in the exposure of wrong, and the ventilation of what they call evil. Does it ever occur to sucb that in a community, ss in a family, there are some slips of morals that had better be hidden from publiq gaze? The newspaper which always reports the vices and the failures and shortcomings of the public, for which it is printed, is an evil in the community.— The gossiping woman or the censorious man who, in private life, scatters scandal, or rebukes shortcomings, are looked upon as dangerous and hurtful. Why is a newspaper less so when it follows the same course? Fearlessness does not consist in publishing the little vanities of people, or spreading abroad their foibles, or scattering gossip, bat In defending right, whether in morals or in public policy, in condemning wrong, in bail dins ap chsraoUr, not in tearing It down, in spreading good report not evil, in speaking in kindness as well as in rebuke.

is not evidence of courage to attack indiscriminately for the gratification of revenge. It is more often the evidence of the worst form of cowardice.