THE editor is the great American schoolmaster. None other is worthy to be compared with him.
He is about as numerous as all other teachers combined. His lessons are given more frequently, they last longer and they cost less than any others.
To him forty-nine students in every fifty are indebted for the only post-graduate course they ever receive. Many others would have no education at all if it were not for him.
He does not always know his business so well that he could not know it better, but whatever he does know he imparts steadily, as well as some that he does not honor.
He is the only influence upon whom the public can absolutely depend to right any wrong which is being endured in spite of the efforts and oaths of legislators. When law is lazy and legislators are venal it is the editor, and the editor only, who comes to the relief of the public. The public will not do this for itself. It seems to consider{400} its duty done when it casts its ballot. More than half a century ago, when editors were not supposed to think their souls their own, the first Napoleon said, “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” Napoleon certainly knew the value of bayonets.
The newspaper is the universal tribunal. It is an open court and there is justice of a sort for every one there at a trifling cost, one cent, two or three, as the case may be. The editor is the lawyer to whom the poor man must of necessity come. His court is one of equity, and it is to equity courts after all that all of us are inclined to resort when we insist upon a final decision.
He is the people’s advocate. Before a law can be suggested in legislature or Congress to undo a wrong or strengthen a right, the editor has already suggested it, debated both sides of it and rendered a decision, frequently a dozen or twenty decisions, which the public are inclined to admit or regard as accurate. He sometimes gets hold of a subject wrong end first, but he will submit to correction and improvement quicker than any judge or jury on record. He may not always admit that he has changed his mind, or that he turned over, or that he has turned his coat, but the change is there all the same, to any one who will read his paper.
He is the only biographer and historian which the mass of the people can read. And he gives{401}
Image not available: GALLERY OF FINE ARTS.
GALLERY OF FINE ARTS.
more information for a given amount of money than the cheapest circulating library in the world.
The editor is also invaluable as a social barometer. As Thackeray once said, “The newspaper is typical of the community in which it is encouraged and circulated; it tells its character as well as its condition.” This is awfully severe upon some communities, and upon the readers of certain papers, but it is none the less true.
Unselfish thinkers, who are concerned chiefly for the good of the community, are always the men who esteem the editor most highly. Wendell Phillips, who for more than thirty years was abused by about half the editors of the land, said, “Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.” Many years before, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of our government, said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should prefer the latter.”
The editor has improved more rapidly in the past twenty-five years than the representative of any other profession. Theologians, physicians and lawyers all belong to schools of one sort or other, but of late years there has come up a new school of journalism which is called independent, and it has become so popular with{402} readers of newspapers that the number of professors and students in it are increasing at a most gratifying rate.
James Gordon Bennett, Jr., explains one difference clearly when he says: “There is one grand distinction between journals—some are newspapers, some are organs. An organ is simply a daily pamphlet published in the interest of some party, or persons, or some agitation.” But the organs are not as numerous as they used to be.
Who would have imagined any time before the late civil war that in any great political campaign preceding a general election in this country there would be scores and almost hundreds of independent newspapers. The time was when a newspaper could not exist unless it were a party or personal organ. But the newspaper has gradually risen from being a mere partisan or personal mouthpiece to being the mouthpiece of its own proprietor. At the present day no properly qualified journalist need attach himself to either party for financial reasons. If he is competent to make a good newspaper he is quite free to express his own opinions regardless of whom he may help or hurt, and the position is so delightful that a great many editors rush into it apparently for the mere pleasure of expressing their own opinions. During the last general election the scarcity of strong party organs, even in the largest{403} cities where they were supposed most to be needed, was a matter of general comment among practical politicians, and it is known that some newspapers changed hands solely for the purpose of being turned into party organs and that it was frequently so difficult to obtain control of existing journals that new ones had to be started for the sole purpose of supplying their respective parties with mouthpieces. This may be considered a compliment to the personal interest of the average journalist or to his personal ability. But, whichever it is, it is highly creditable to the profession, and it is a result which could not have been hoped for twenty-five years ago.
Now-a-days every journalist of actual ability, no matter which party he belongs to, wishes that he may become owner of an independent newspaper. It is impossible for him not to see that the independent newspaper is not only the most quoted and the most talked about, but the most profitable. The paper which is read by both parties is sure of more subscribers, purchasers and advertisers than that which draws all its inspiration from the platform formed by a single convention. The independent editor hears himself quoted in Congress by men of both parties; and these same men are quite likely to grumble and swear within a week to find themselves castigated by the same men whose words of wisdom they recently availed themselves of.{404}
The possibilities of the press for good, now that independence in journalism is practicable and also a business temptation, cannot be overestimated. Public opinion can be created more rapidly by daily appeals and arguments which the newspaper reader can quietly look over by himself, pausing whenever he may like to think over what he has read, than anything that can appear in campaign speeches or magazine essays or books by the most noted writers and specialists. The editor, as a rule, has dropped the old stilted form of the essay, and puts his arguments in the ordinary colloquial form, with homely illustrations and forcible applications so far as words go. If it didn’t seem like complimenting him too highly and making him vain, it would not be unf............