Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1901 — Tom Jones' Cat [ARTICLE]

Tom Jones' Cat

Knows as Much About China as Do the Newspaper Men

Writing in Donahoe’s Magazine on the situation in China, Rev. Father Joseph M. Gleason, who is with the American forces in Pekin, maintains that the Boxer movement with all its attendant horrors was not a result of the presence of missionaries in China. It was an anti-foreign demonstration rather than anti-Christian. The reverend gentleman takes the newspaper correspondents to task for attributing the trouble to the missionaries and says of them; “A newspaper man rushes into a country of which he hardly knew the* existence before his arrival, takes no trouble to learn a word of the language, corners a few residents, and after a few cigars, and more drinks, closes the interview, and writes for his paper. He Is paid a fancy salary as special correspondent and must write something for his paper, and this something is, as a rule, superficial generalizing of the veriest rubbish. Yet

the public opinion of intelligent nations sometimes hangs on the presumed omniscience of a correspondent who flits in one day and skips the country the next. What did the ordinary correspondent know or find out about the Chinese question? Nothing, and many of them did not try hard to learn that much. Yet these men have told the general public that the missionaries did it all. They caused the whole row, etc., ad nauseam. The ordinary correspondent who has written to the United States on this matter knows no more about it than Tom Jones’ cat. Now I am not writing a diatribe on newspaper men. I have been thrown in quite intimate relations with them for one year and a half, but that does not blind me to the fact that they don’t ‘know it all’ and they can’t ‘know It all* in a week or two, and that much of their inflated verbiage is nonsense written simply to fill the bill for the editor who pays them.”