the best oration was to win the highest honor in college. Not only did the students set this value on it, the whole community set the same value. Traditions of a winning oration would be handed down year after year.

--

In the third year of my college life I was elated by winning this prize. Most experiences of the rather dull life it seems monotonous except for the joy that the old professor of Greek gave me, and the thrill and inspiration of the president's oratory are forgotten; but I recall very vividly the night of that oratorical triumph. My mother, who had meant to make the long journey to hear me, was too ill to come; and this was a grief to me, and I think to her, for years. But my cousin Margaret and her mother

came.

My cousin was now the most beautiful young woman that I had ever seen. That night after the ball (the theological influence was strong enough to forbid a ball at Commencement, but the secular oratorical influence was strong enough to have a mild ball at the time of the winter

contest for the great medal), that night after the ball, when my Aunt Margaret kissed me in her pride, I kissed my cousin and put the medal about her neck. In spite of religious doubts, before I went to bed I knelt and said reverently, “O Lord, I thank thee for a chance to give my life to my country, and for her." And, with my most sonorous periods still sounding in my memory, I fell asleep.

During my last vacation two events happened that strongly impressed me. A little village had now grown up at our home, and a church had been built there. It was prayer-meeting night, and I went with my mother. The preacher had suddenly been taken ill. Who should read the Scriptures and offer a prayer? One of the old men of the church arose and suggested that I should do so. I am sure that I should have refused if my mother had not sat beside me. Her presence and what I knew to be her wish made it impossible for me to refuse. It was a little

thing, thing, reading a chapter from the Bible, and making a prayer. But in that community and under those circumstances it was accepted by the people as an announcement that I would become a preacher. My mother's opinion was what bothered me; and I felt sure that she had a renewed hope.

It was during this vacation that I was reading Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma and Strauss's Life of Jesus. This was the question that I must settle, and still settle all alone, whether the orthodox interpretation of the Bible and of the meaning of life was tenable. Huxley's essays were appearing then, and I read them, too.

Those whose early life was not spent in a superheated orthodox atmosphere may see small need of a life-and-death struggle about such a subject. But there are others who will know how profoundly it may torment a young life. One of my contemporaries in college was fighting the same battle alone at about the same time; and he killed himself from sheer despair. Another wandered over the world as long as his little fortune would carry him, seeking light; and, when he found it, he was prematurely old. No liberty ever cost a harder struggle than the liberty that I at last won. But, while the struggle was going on, I felt a sort of treason to my mother; and I understood why many men have killed themselves because of religious doubts.

The other event of that vacation was my grandfather's unexpected action. The old man was now in his tenth decade, with his intelligence still clear. I will try to describe his announcement to me as he made it.

He rang the little bell that he always kept near him when he was in the house. That was the signal for Ephraim.

"Yes, ol' mars'er."

"Find your Mars' Nicholas and fetch him here. I wish to speak with him.”

He sat on the porch, and Uncle Ephraim and I were soon standing near him, I in front, the old servant behind him.

Warburton wrote of one who is chiefly known by being pilloried in the Dunciad that he "ended in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper." Even later it was recorded of the Rev. Dr. Dodd, author of the Beauties of Shakespeare, that he "descended so low as to become editor of a newspaper." After that but one step remained, — to the gallows; and this was duly taken by Dr. Dodd in 1777, when he was hanged for forgery. A calling digged from such a pit may, without our special wonder, display something of the push and insolence natural in a class whose privileges were long so slender or so questioned that they must be loudly proclaimed for fear they may be forgotten.

This flaunting and over-emphasis also go well with the charge that the press of to-day is commercialized. That accusation no one undertaking to comment on newspapers can pass unnoticed. Yet why should journalism be exempt? It is as freely asserted that colleges are commercialized; the theatre is accused of knowing no standard but that of the box-office; politics has the money-taint upon it; and even the church is arraigned for ignoring the teachings of St. James, and being too much a respecter of the persons of the rich. If it is true that the commercial spirit rules the press, it is at least in good company. In actual fact, occasional instances of gross and unscrupulous financial control of newspapers for selfish or base ends must be admitted to exist. There are undoubtedly some editors who bend their conscience to their dealing. Newspaper proprietors exist who sell themselves for gain. But this is not what is ordinarily meant by the charge of commercialization. Reference is, rather, to the newspaper as a money-making institution. "When shall we have a journal," asked a clergyman not long ago, "that will be published without advertisements?"

The answer is, never, - at least, I hope so, for the good of American journalism. We have no official press. We have no subsidized press. We have not even an

endowed press. What that would be in this country I can scarcely imagine, but I am sure it would have little or no influence. A newspaper carries weight only as it can point to evidence of public sympathy and support. But that means a business side; it means patronage; it means an eye to money. A newspaper, like an army, goes upon its belly, though it does not follow that it must eat dirt. The dispute about being commercialized is always a question of more or less. When Horace Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841, he had but a thousand dollars of his own in cash. Yet his struggle to make the paper a going concern was just as intense as if he were starting it to-day with a capital (and it would be needed) of a million. Greeley, to his honor be it said, refused from the beginning to take certain advertisements. But so do newspaper proprietors to-day whose expenses per week are more than Greeley's were for the first year.

The immensely large capital now required for the conduct of a daily newspaper in a great city has had important consequences. It has made the newspaper more of an institution, less of a personal organ. Men no longer designate journals by the owner's or editor's name. It used to be Bryant's paper, or Greeley's paper, or Raymond's, or Bennett's. Now it is simply Times, Herald, Tribune, and so on. No single personality can stamp. itself upon the whole organism. It is too vast. It is a great piece of property, to be administered with skill; it is a carefully planned organization which best produces the effect when the personalities of those who work for it are swallowed up. The individual withers, but the newspaper is more and more. Journalism becomes impersonal. There are no more "great editors," but there is a finer esprit de corps, better "team play," an institution more and more firmly established and able to justify itself.

Large capital in newspapers, and their heightened earning power, tend to steady them. Freaks and rash experiments are

also shut out by lack of means. Greeley reckoned up a hundred or more newspapers that had died in New York before 1850. Since that time it would be hard to name ten. I can remember but two metropolitan dailies within twenty-five years that have absolutely suspended publication. Only contrast the state of things in Parisian journalism. There must be at least thirty daily newspapers in the French capital. Few of them have the air of living off their own business. Yet the necessary capital and the cost of production are so much smaller than ours that their various backers can afford to keep them afloat. But this fact does not make their sincerity or purity the more evident. On the contrary, the rumor of sinister control is more frequently circulated in connection with the French press than with our own. Our higher capitalization helps us. Just because a great sum is invested, it cannot be imperiled by allowing unscrupulous men to make use of the newspaper property; for that way ruin lies, in the end. The corrupt employment has to be concealed. If it were surely known, for example, that Mr. Morgan, or Mr. Ryan, or Mr. Harriman owned a New York newspaper, and was utilizing it as a means of furthering his schemes, support would speedily fail it, and it would soon dry up from the roots.

This give and take between the press and the public is vital to a just conception of American journalism. The editor does not nonchalantly project his thoughts into the void. He listens for the echo of his words. His relation to his supporters is not unlike Gladstone's definition of the intimate connection between the orator and his audience. As the speaker gets from his hearers in mist what he gives back in shower, so the newspaper receives from the public as well as gives to it. Too often it gets as dust what it gives back as mud; but that does not alter the relation. Action and reaction are all the while going on between the press and its patrons. Hence it follows that the responsibility for the more crying evils of journalism

must be divided. I would urge no exculpation for the editor who exploits crime, scatters filth, and infects the community with moral poison. The original responsibility is his, and it is a fearful one. But it is not solely his. The basest and most demoralizing journal that lives, lives by public approval or tolerance. Its readers and advertisers have its life in their hands. At a word from them it would either reform or die. They have the power of "recall" over it, as it is by some proposed to grant the people a power of recall over bad representatives in legislature or Congress. The very dependence of the press upon support gives its patrons the power of life and death over it. Advertisers are known to go to a newspaper office to seek favors, sometimes improper, often innocent. Why should they, and mere readers, too, not exercise their implied right to protest against vulgarity, the exaggeration of the trivial, hysteria, indecency, immorality, in the newspaper which they are asked to buy or to patronize? To a journalist of the offensive class they could say: "You excuse yourself by alleging that you simply give what the public demands; but we say that your very assertion is an insult to us and an outrage upon the public. You say that nobody protests against your course; well, we are here to protest. You point to your sales; we tell you that, unless you mend your columns, we will buy no more." There lies here, I am persuaded, a vast unused power for the toning up of our journalism. At any rate, the reform of a free press in a free people can be brought about only by some such reaction of the medium upon the instrument. Legislation direct would be powerless. Sir Samuel Romilly perceived this when he argued in Parliament against proposals to restrict by law the "licentious press." He said that if the press were more licentious than formerly, it was because it had not yet got over the evils of earlier arbitrary control; and the only sure way to reform it was to make it still more free. Romilly would doubtless have

agreed that a free people will, in the long run, have as good newspapers as it wants and deserves to have.

As it is, public sentiment has a way, on occasion, of speaking through the press with astonishing directness and power. All the noise and extravagance, the ignorance and the distortion, cannot obscure this. There is a rough but great value in the mere publicity which the newspaper affords. The free handling of rulers has much for the credit side. When Senior was talking with Thiers in 1856, the conversation fell upon the severe press laws under Napoleon III. The Englishman said that perhaps these were due to the license of newspapers in the time of the foregoing republic, when their attacks on public men were often the extreme of scurrility. "C'était horrible," said Thiers; “mais, pour moi, j'aime mieux être gouverné par des honnêtes gens qu'on traite comme des voleurs, que par des voleurs qu'on traite en honnêtes gens." And when you have some powerful robbers to invoke the popular verdict upon, there is nothing like modern journalism for doing the job thoroughly. Those great names in our business and political firmament which lately have fallen like Lucifer, dreaded exposure in the press most of all. Courts and juries they could have faced with equanimity; or, rather, their lawyers would have done it for them in the most beautiful illustration of the law's delay. But the very clamor of newspaper publicity was like an embodied public conscience pronouncing condemnation, - every headline an officer. I know of no other power on earth that could have stripped away from these rogues every shelter which their money could buy, and been to them such an advance section of the Day of Judgment. In the immense publicity that dogged them they saw that worst of all punishments described by Shelley:

- when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally;
And after many a false and fruitless crime,
Scorn track thy lagging fall.

It is, no doubt, a belief in this honestly and wholesomely scourging power of newspapers which has made the champions of modern democracy champions also of the freedom of the press. It has not been seriously hampered or shackled in this country; but the history of its emancipation from burdensome taxation in England shows how the progressive and reactionary motives or temperaments come to view. When Gladstone was laboring, fifty years ago, to remove the last special tax upon newspapers, Lord Salisbury - he was then Lord Robert Cecil

opposed him with some of his finest sneers. Could it be maintained that a person of any education could learn anything from a penny paper? It might be said that the people would learn from the press what had been uttered by their representatives in Parliament, but how much would that add to their education? They might even discover the opinions of the editor. All this was very interesting, but it did not carry real instruction to the mind. To talk about a tax on newspapers being a tax on knowledge was a prostitution of real education. And so on. But contrast this with John Bright's opinion. In a letter written in 1885, but not published till this year, he said: "Few men in England owe so much to the press as I do. Its progress has been very great. I was one of those who worked earnestly to overthrow the system of taxation which from the time of Queen Anne had fettered, I might almost say, strangled it out of existence. . . . I hope the editors and conductors of our journals may regard themselves as under a great responsibility, as men engaged in the great work of instructing and guiding our people. On the faithful performance of their duties, on their truthfulness and their adherence to the moral law, the future of our country depends."

...

To pass from these ideals to the tendencies and perplexities of newspapers as they are is not possible without the sensation of a jar. For specimens of the faults found in even the reputable press by fair