LOADED LLAMAS, THE PERUVIAN SHEEP, BEASTS OF BURDEN OF THE SOUTH AMERICAN HIGHLANDS borne in mind that three different kinds of cloth are made from it,-felts, woolens, and worsteds. Felt is made from wool or fur in the mass; woolens and worsteds are spun from threads. Further, the wool employed in the manufacture of woolens is carded; that for worsteds is combed. The sheep that has modified the sheep of all other countries is the Spanish Merino, of which "the wool is long, soft, and twisted into silky looking spiral ringlets." The British Islands can claim the largest number of valuable wool-producing breeds, of which the largest and made from wool simply by spreading it out heaviest fleeced is the Lincoln. Some of evenly and then hammering it while moist. these fleeces weigh from 18 to 20 pounds, This, of course, is felt undoubtedly with a staple 20 inches long. South Amer the first cloth. It is in the fine merino wools that these imbrications are most numerous, pointed, and acute, numbering as many as 2800 per inch. Felt made therefrom will wear like iron. In mohair the imbrications disappear almost entirely. In considering wool it must be ica possesses, in addition to the domestic sheep introduced into the Western Hemisphere by the early English, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers, a group of wool-bearing animals native to the country. This group is the auchenia, which comprises four species,-the alpaca, the guanaco, the llama, and the vicuña. The alpaca and the llama were domesticated by the native Indians long before the advent of the Spaniards into South America. The guanaco, found from the equator south to Tierra del Fuego, is about the size of an English red deer. The llama is somewhat smaller and is a habitant of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Both of these animals, esteemed mainly for food and as beasts of burden, yield a fine quality of wool or hair, ordinarily sold as alpaca. The vicuña is about the size of a fallow deer, lives in the mountains of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, and seldom descends below 13,000 feet. It is practically a wild animal and has an exceedingly delicate wool, worth nearly twice as much as alpaca. The alpaca, like the domestic sheep, is kept in flocks. In the mountains of Peru and Bolivia it is driven from pasture to pasture, being brought down to the villages to be sheared. The wool varies from 2 to 6 inches in length and is of a fine, lustrous quality. These and the domestic sheep are the animals from which Spanish-America derives its wealth in wool. The Bulletin gives the following interesting data concerning the number of sheep and the exports of wool for the various countries of the South American continent: In Argentina for the season of 1849-50 the wool clip was 17,600,000 pounds. In 1899-1900 it had increased to 525,800,000 pounds, or about one-fourth of the world's production. In 1908 Argentina possessed 67,211,754 sheep, a total exceeded by Australia alone. The exports of wool for 1908 aggregated 386,183,600 pounds. The mainland of Patagonia and the archipelago, of Tierra del Fuego are divided between Chile and Argentina; and over the, entire country the sheep industry is spreading. The province of Santa Cruz, which includes the Argentine part of Patagonia, but not Tierra del Fuego, produced 19,800,000 pounds of wool in to Punta Arenas has about 4,000,000 sheep; and the season of 1908-09. The territory tributary in the whole of the Chilean territory of Magellan there are about 1,900,000. alpaca wool and nearly 10,000 pounds of vicuña From Peru 4,000,000 to 6,000,000 pounds of wool are exported annually. Ecuador and Bolivia are also alpaca-exporting states. The pioneers in the industry in the region of the Strait of Magellan were mostly Welsh and Scotch, who are extending their energies over all the available grass lands, so that it will be but a short while until there are 20,000,000 sheep in this the most southern territory of the world. The Bulletin writer gives also some figures for the United States. It appears that on January 1, 1910, there were 57,216,000 sheep in the country, with a value of $233,644,000. The production is estimated at 400,000,000 pounds of sheep's wool and about 1,000,000 of mohair and goat hair. Since 1900 there has been an enormous increase in the wool-manufacturing industry, especially in the manufacture of worsteds. HAS THE PRESS LOST ITS POWER? THAT the hold of the press on popular confidence has unquestionably been loosened during the last forty or fifty years is the opinion expressed by Mr. Francis E. Leupp in the Atlantic Monthly for February. Mr. Leupp is one of our veteran journalists, having been for many years, before he became Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Washington correspondent of the New York Evening Post. He has, therefore, a practical acquaintance with his subject which gives his views additional weight. The airy dismissal of some proposition as paper talk" is heard, he says, at every social gathering; and it would seem that "in our common-sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers say." As to why an institution so full of potentiality as a free press does not produce more effect than it does, and why so many of its leading writers today find reason to deplore the altered attitude of the people toward it, he suggests the following reasons: 66 mere new's The transfer of both properties and policies from personal to impersonal control; the rise of the cheap magazine; the tendency to specialization in all forms of public instruction; the fierceness of competition in the newspaper business; the demand for larger capital, unsettling the former equipoise between counting-room and editorial-room; the invasion of newspaper offices by the universal mania of hurry; the development of the news-getting at the expense of the news-interpreting function; the tendency to remold narratives of fact so as to confirm officemade policies; the growing disregard of decency in the choice of news to be specially exploited, and the scant time now spared by men of the world for reading journals of general intelli gence. It will be noticed that of these ten causes for the alleged decline of the press, nine are laid at the doors of the newspaper and periodical press, and one concerns the reading public itself. We are unable, through lack of space, to give Mr. Leupp's observations on more than a few of the more important of them. The transfer of the newspapers from personal to corporate ownership was inevitable, being "not a matter of preference, but a practical necessity." The expense of modernizing the mechanical equipment alone imposed a burden which few aided. Add to that the cost of an ever-expandnewspaper proprietors were able to carry uning news service, and the higher salaries demanded by satisfactory employees in all departments, and it is hardly wonderful that one private owner after another gave up his singlehanded struggle against hopeless financial odds. and sought aid from men of larger means. The capitalists who were willing to take large blocks of stock were usually men with political or speculative ends to gain, to which they could make a newspaper minister by way of compensating them for the hazards they faced. These newcomers were not idealists, like the founders and managers of most of the important journals of an earlier period. They were men of keen commercial instincts. They naturally looked at everything through the medium of the balance-sheet. Principles? Yes, ride even good things to death. The noblest principles were good things, but we must not cause in creation cannot be promoted by a defunct newspaper, and to keep its champion alive there must be a net cash income. The circulation must be pushed, and the advertising patronage increased. More circulation can be got only by keeping the public stirred up. Employ band, and bring him back to his wife; organize private detectives to pursue the runaway husa marine expedition to find the missing ship; send a reporter into the Sudan to interview the beleaguered general whose own government is powerless to reach him with an army. Blow the trumpet, and make ringing announcements every day. If nothing new is to be had, refurbish something so old that people have forgotten it. Mr. Leupp goes on to say that "in the old-style newspaper, in spite of the fact that the editorial articles were usually anonymous, the editor's name was so well known to the public that we talked about "what Greeley thought" of this or that, or wondered "whether Bryant was going to support" a certain ticket, or shook our heads over the latest sensational screed "in Bennett's paper." We knew their private histories and their idiosyncrasies; their very foibles sometimes furnished our best exegetical key to their writings. When a politician whom Bryant had criticised threatened to pull his nose, and Bryant responded by stalking ostentatiously three times around the bully at their next meeting in pubfaith in the editor because he was only human, lic, the readers of the Evening Post did not lose but guessed about how far to discount future utterances of the paper with regard to his an- The mazagine took on a new character about twenty years ago, leaping fearlessly into the newspaper arena, and seeking its topics in the happenings of the day. It raised a corps of men and women who might otherwise have toiled in obscurity all their lives, and gave them a chance to become authorities on questions of immediate interest, till they are now recognized as constituting a limited but highly specialized profession. One group occupied itself with trusts and trust magnates; another with politicians whose rise had Copyright by Waldon Fawcett, Washington. been so meteoric as to suggest a romance behind it; another with the inside history of international episodes, another with new religious movements and their leaders, and so on. What was the result? The public following which the newspaper editors used to command when they did business in the open, but which was falling away from their anonymous successors, attached itself promptly to the magazinists. As illustrating how the esteem of the people for the press is weakened through the intense competition between newspapers, the recent Peary-Cook controversy is cited: One newspaper syndicate having, at large expense, procured a narrative directly from the pen of Cook, and another accomplished a like feat with Peary, to which could "we, the people." look for an unbiased opinion on the matters in dispute? An admission by either that its star contributor could trifle with the truth was equivalent to throwing its own exploit into bankruptcy. So each was bound to stand by the claimant with whom it had first identified itself, and fight the battle out like an attorney under retainer; and what started as a serious contest of priority in a scientific discovery threatened to end as a wrangle over a newspaper "beat." "Speed before everything" is perhaps the most noticeable feature of modern newspaper management; and this has brought about changes both in editorial writing and in news-getting. In the department of special correspondence the change is most patent: HON. FRANCIS E. LEUPP At an important point like Washington, for instance, the old corps of writers were men of mature years, most of whom had passed an apprenticeship in the editorial chair, and still held a semi-editorial relation to the newspapers they represented. When, in the later eighties, the new order came, it came with a rush. The first inkling of it was a notice received, in the middle of one busy night, by a correspondent who had been faithfully serving a prominent Western news paper for a dozen years, to turn over his bureau to a young man who up to that time had been doing local reporting on its home staff. Transfers of other bureaus followed fast. A few were left, and still remain, undisturbed in personnel or character of work. . . . The bold fact was that the newspaper managers had bowed to the hustling humor of the age. They no longer cared to serve journalistic viands, which required deliberate mastication, to patrons who clamored for a quick lunch. So they passed on to their representatives at a distance the same injunction they were incessantly pressing upon their reporters at home: "Get the news, and send it while it is hot. Don't wait to tell us what it means or what it points to; we can do our own ratiocinating." Is the public a loser by this obscuration of the correspondent's former function? I believe so. An inquiry was made by Dr. Walter Dill Scott into the reading habits of 2000 representative business and professional men. He found that most of them spent not more than fifteen minutes daily on their newspapers. Some spent less, so that the average was five to ten minutes. Is this scant regard for his newspaper due to the fact that the ordinary man of affairs no longer believes half that it tells him? Does this condition indicate that the newspapers have so perverted the public taste with sensational surprises that it can no longer appreciate normal information normally conveyed? There is one phase of this business that does not appear on the surface. The fore going criticisms have all been made from the point of view of the citizen of fair intelligence. What about the other element in the community, which is drawn toward the cheapest, lowest, daily prints,-which during the noon hour and at night devours all the tenement tragedies, the palace scandals, the incendiary appeals designed to make the poor man think that thrift is robbery? Over that element the vicious paper is exercising a powerful sway, which is not likely to be soon relinquished. NEWSPAPERS THAT DO NOT GIVE THE NEWS MR. R. LEUPP'S article in the February Atlantic on "The Waning Power of the Press" is followed in the March number by an equally forceful criticism from the pen of Prof. Edward A. Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, who holds that for many of the faults of the papers, such as their sensationalism, their exploitation of the private affairs of prominent persons, and their embroidering of facts, the American people themselves must be blamed. But, he adds, "there is just one deadly, damning count against the daily newspaper as it is coming to be, namely, it does not give the news. Good "live" news, red-hot stuff," is deliberately distorted or suppressed." This condition of the daily press has been brought about by three economic developments in the field of newspaper publishing: (1) The daily newspaper in the large cities has become a capitalistic enterprise. (A million dollars will not begin to outfit a metropolitan newspaper.) (2) The growth of newspaper advertising. (3) The subordination of newspapers to other enterprises. Professor Ross gives some striking illustrations of the suppression of important news, which, he says, are hardly a third of the material that has come to the writer's attention." Among them are the following: A prominent Philadelphia clothier visiting New York was caught perverting boys, and cut his throat. His firm being a heavy advertiser, not a single paper in his home city mentioned the tragedy. During a strike of the elevator men in the large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters' union was beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a strong-arm man hired by that firm. The story, supported by affidavits, was given by a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men, 66 each of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account never appeared. shops had to sign an exceedingly mean and opIn another city the sales-girls in the big pressive contract, which, if generally known, would have made the firms odious to the pubcontracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions A prominent social worker brought these that had become established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would print a line on the subject. lic. strike the newspapers were disposed to treat it On the outbreak of a justifiable street-car in a sympathetic way. Suddenly they veered, and became unanimously hostile to the strikers. Inquiry showed that the big merchants had threatened to withdraw their advertisements unless the newspapers changed their attitude. In the summer of 1908 disastrous fires raged in the northern Lake country, and great areas of standing timber were destroyed. A prominent organ of the lumber industry belittled the losses and printed reassuring statements from lumbermen who were at the very moment calling upon the State for a fire patrol. When taxed with the deceit, the organ pleaded its obligation to support the market for the bonds which the lumber companies of the Lake region had been advertising in its columns. On account of agitating for teachers' pensions, a teacher was summarily dismissed by a corrupt school-board, in violation of their own published rule regarding tenure. An influential newspaper published the facts of schoolboard grafting brought out in the teacher's suit for reinstatement until, through his club affiliations, a big merchant was induced to threaten the paper with the withdrawal of his advertising. No further reports of the revelations appeared. Many of the dailies serve as mouthpieces of the financial powers, as was shown at the outset of the last financial depression, when the owner of a leading newspaper, having called his reporters together, addressed them: « Boys, the first of you who turns in a story of a lay-off or a shut-down gets the sack." An amusing reference is made by Pro |