The Innocents Abroad


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it is hatching deviltry. Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with  
the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper,  
and finally delivering his profound decision: "This thing means mischief  
--it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive--suppress it! Warn the  
publisher that we can not have this sort of thing: put the editor in  
prison!"  
The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constantinople. Two  
Greek papers and one French one were suppressed here within a few days of  
each other. No victories of the Cretans are allowed to be printed. From  
time to time the Grand Vizier sends a notice to the various editors that  
the Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that editor  
knows better, he still has to print the notice. The Levant Herald is too  
fond of speaking praisefully of Americans to be popular with the Sultan,  
who does not relish our sympathy with the Cretans, and therefore that  
paper has to be particularly circumspect in order to keep out of trouble.  
Once the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper that the  
Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different tenor,  
from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two hundred and fifty  
dollars for it. Shortly he printed another from the same source and was  
imprisoned three months for his pains. I think I could get the assistant  
editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along  
without it.  
To suppress a paper here involves the ruin of the publisher, almost. But  
in Naples I think they speculate on misfortunes of that kind. Papers are  
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