The Weekly Comet

Panic Makers.—Newspapers, besides being a great blessing are also a great curse. It has become fashionable for them to keep a column standing to note the progress of "terrible things." A column wherein the progress of some "Wandering Jew" in the way of pestilence or famine is noted in horrid detail. Such accounts are not unfrequently painted up in such ghastly colors as to terrify people out of their wits, and the public is kept in a perpetual fever heat, at midsummer, the very time they should use sweetened ice water and refreshing and pleasure inspiring amusements. How has it been the past season, and the season that went before this? Why the newspaper has been a kind of daily death warrant to the million, and we doubt not that many a poor fellow who is now feeding the worms in the earth might have been a living moving soul at this hour, if these terrible things had not been kept standing before him in his daily paper. He might say to himself "I will not read these things," but they have always been the first to attract his attention, and we have known men to take a fit of "tremblings" over their morning "coffee" or "bitters," and shake themselves into the prevailing epidemic. "Five hundred" a week in Gotham is a goodly number to be called and have to go with unpacked knapsack to the land of Nod, and yet if the births were put alongside for the same week, people would see that there is nothing to apprehend in the seed running out. And why publish death tables at one season and not another? Why establish quarantines at one season and not another? Why should every little four by six one horse town fill their papers with well gotten up ordinances prohibiting the people of other three by five towns from visiting them? All these things conspire to produce epidemics, if they are not the immediate cause of them; and they show a plentiful lack of that philanthropy which is the boast of every Christian community.