sensation-paragraphists

Updated: May 6, 2025

It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest, it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade the men who have thus traded, during the whole war on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.

Henry Morford - Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862