The other day an elderly Jewish woman entered the office of the Jewish Courier and asked for the editor. With tears in her eyes she pleaded with him not to be cruel, not to be merciless to the young, righteous and good-looking Count whose doom seemed to her to be inevitable. When asked to explain her pleadings, she said that she was reading the serial story every day with the most thorough attention, and that she had a heart full of compassion and pity for the victim of the conspiracy in this story who, by the way, happens to be a Count, and she asked the editor not to let the young, innocent man die but to be more just and to let the conspirators perish.

The appearance of the elderly woman before the editor of this paper throws a glaring light on the relation of the Jewish reader to his or her Jewish newspaper. The Yiddish reading public especially has more respect for the printed 2word than any other group of newspaper readers and the readers of Yiddish dailies, an honest and unsophisticated group of people rely on the newspaper not only for news but also for truth in the news and believe what they read in the newspaper. And they read their newspaper in a manner different from other peoples. They read not only headlines or certain categories of news, but they read their newspaper from beginning to end and they read it on the installment plan--in the morning they read the first page, in the afternoon, when they have time, they read the inside pages, the articles and the advertisements, and in the evening they read the editorial comment. A reader of a Yiddish daily will not throw his paper away until he has read it from beginning to end and if everything that is reported in the papers does not seem probable to him, he will call up the editor and ask for explanations. If he disagrees with an opinion expressed in the paper, he will come up to the editor and try to argue the case with him, or he will express his point of view on the question in the editorial.

The relation of a Jew to his paper is quite a personal and intimate one. He is 3very careful in the selection of his paper. If he happens to be a conservative man, or not radically inclined, he will never touch a radical paper and he expects his paper to defend his point of view and his opinion on matters not only political but also theological, literary and social, artistic, etc. He does not consider himself a mere reader of the paper but a sort of a shareholder in the paper, so much is he obsessed by the idea of his paper. No other foreign language paper and no American paper is so much in touch with its readers as is the Yiddish paper. The Jewish reader considers the paper not only as the defender of his views but also as his impartial arbitrator and it is a daily occurrence in the editorial office of a Yiddish daily that two contending parties ask the publisher or the editor to arbitrate between them or call upon the publisher or the editor to take the initiative in certain communal matters or to try to solve certain communal problems not only by the way of defending a certain cause editorially but by personally participating in a certain movement, because to the Yiddish reader, the Yiddish daily is sanctum sanctorum and the idea that he buys a newspaper to read the news in it or to read some editorial comment made by a man who can speak with authority on a 4certain subject is strange to his mind. To him the newspaper does not consist of news and editorials only. To him the newspaper is an institution of truth-telling, an educational agency and an enlightening force and so forth. Everything printed in his newspaper is true not only as far as normal truth goes but is true also from a moral point of view. Everything that he reads in the paper he takes very seriously for he relies on his newspaper not only for a description of the world's history of yesterday but also for moral and intellectual truth.

In ancient times, when two Jews had a quarrel they went to the Rabbi to settle it. Today they go to a Yiddish newspaper. In short, the Yiddish newspaper is to the Yiddish reader not only a news-selling agency but a great moral factor and an educational institution.

One would be surprised to learn how much Yiddish newspaper readers know about the value of merchandise. An old-fashioned Jew or Jewess can tell you exactly the value of a suit, a pair of shoes, a piece of furniture, or of women's 5apparel because the [y] read the advertisements in the paper with the same attention and earnestness as they read news and articles, and the Yiddish reading public buys more than any other group of people in a similar economic situation because a Yiddish newspaper reader reads the advertising part of his paper very closely and it is the constant reading of the advertisements that stimulates his buying desires.

Every people read their papers in their fashion. The Americans are famous for their predilection for big headlines, and a great many of them read only headlines. The Germans are famous for their predilection for magazine articles in daily newspapers. The French turn first to the scandal column. The Spaniards turn first to the religious column, but the Jews have their own way of reading daily newspapers. They read it with the same earnestness and the same zeal as if the newspaper were not a newspaper but a religious book. They believe their paper, they trust it and they consider it much more than a news-selling business.