Furthermore, it put the “Clarion” in the position of champion of the city’s commercial interests and daily bade defiance to those who declared the paper an enemy and a traitor to business.  In editorials, in interviews, in educational articles on hygiene and sanitation, in a course of free lectures covering the whole city and financed by the paper itself, the “Clarion” carried on the fight with unflagging zeal.  Slowly it began to win back general confidence and much of the popularity which it had lost.  One of its reporters in the course of his work contracted the fever and barely pulled through alive, thereby lending a flavor of possible martyrdom to the cause.  McGuire Ellis’s desperate fight for life also added to the romantic element which is so potent an asset with the sentimental American public.  Business, however, still sulked.  The defiance to its principles was too flagrant to be passed over.  If the “Clarion” pulled through, the press would lose respect for the best interests and the vested privileges of commercial Worthington.  Indeed, others of the papers, since the “Clarion’s” declaration of independence, had exhibited a deplorable tendency to disregard hints hitherto having the authority of absolutism over them.

In withholding advertising patronage from the Surtaine daily, the business men were not only seeking reprisals, but also following a sound business principle.  For according to information sedulously spread abroad, it was doubtful whether the “Clarion” would long survive.  Elias M. Pierce’s boast that he would put it out of business gained literal interpretation, as he had intended that it should.  Contrary to his accustomed habit of reticence, he had sought occasion to inform his friends that he expected verdicts against the libeler of his daughter which would throw the concern into bankruptcy, and, perhaps, its proprietor into jail.  No advertiser cares to put money into a publication which may fail next week.  Hence, though the circulation of the “Clarion” went up pretty steadily, the advertising patronage did not keep pace.  Hal found himself hard put to it, at times, to cling to his dogged hopes.  But it was worth while fighting it out to the last dollar.  So much he was assured of by the messages of praise and support which began to come in to him, not from “representative citizens,” but from the earnest, thoughtful, and often obscure toilers and thinkers of the city:  clergymen, physicians, laboring-men, working-women, sociological workers—­his peers.

Then, too, there was the profound satisfaction of promised victory over the pest.  For at the end of six weeks the battle was practically won; by what heroisms, at the cost of what sacrifices, through what disappointments, reversals, and set-backs, against the subtleties of what underground opposition of political influence and twelve per cent finance, is not to be set down here.  The government publications tell, in their brief and pregnant records, this story of one of the most complete and brilliant victories in the history of American hygiene.  My concern is with the story, not of the typhus epidemic, but of a man who fought for and surrendered and finally retrieved his own manhood and the honor of the paper which was his honor.  His share, no small one, in the wiping-out of the pestilence was, to him, but part of the war for which he had enlisted.