putterings       609   <   610   >   611       index

 
      “You don’t seem to think much of business standards,” said the Doctor tolerantly.
      “Not a great deal. I’ve bumped into ’em too hard. Not so long ago I was publisher of a paying daily in an Eastern city. The directors were all high-class business men, and the chairman of the board was one of those philanthropist-charity-donator-pillar-of-the-church chaps with a permanent crease of high respectability down his front. Well, one day there turned up a double murder in the den of one of these venereal quacks that infest every city. It set me on the trail, and I had my best reporter get up a series about that gang of vampires. Naturally that necessitated throwing out their ads. The advertising manager put up a howl, and we took the thing to the board of directors. In those days I had all my enthusiasm on tap. I had an array of facts, too, and I went at that board like a revivalist, telling ’em just the kind of devil-work the ‘men’s special-ists’ did. At the finish I sat down feeling pretty good. Nobody said anything for quite a while. Then the chairman dropped the pencil he’d been puttering with, and said, in a kind of purry voice: ‘Gentlemen: I thought Mr. Ellis’s job on this paper was to make it pay dividends, and not to censor the morals of the community.’”
      “And, by crikey, he was right!” cried Dr. Surtaine.
      “From the business point of view.”
      “Oh, you theorists! You theorists!” Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in a gesture of pleasant despair. “You want to run the world like a Sunday-school class.”
      “Instead of like a three-card-monte game.”
      “With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a sheet like the ‘Clarion’?”
      “A man’s got to eat.”

—

ex Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Clarion; [dramatic] illustrations by W. D. Stevens (1914) : 124
Harvard copy/scan (via google books) : link
U California copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link

—

Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), investigative journalist, muckracker, and novelist; wrote “risqué” novels under the pseudonym of Warner Fabian. Three of the latter can be found via archive.org; they are interesting.
wikipedia : link
 

20 May 2026