If the editor of a newspaper has any regard for his judgment; that
is, if he has any judgment, he will not indulge in prophecy. The most
conspicuous instances of the folly of predictions are those that occur
in a political “campaign.” There is a venerable and hoary tradition
among those ignorant persons who conduct party organs that the best and
most effective way to make their party win is to assert and re-assert
that it _will_. This infantile notion they act upon _ad nauseam_, and
doubtless lose by it a good many votes for their party that it would
otherwise receive, by making the more credulous among their readers
so sure of success that they do not think it worth while to vote. If
you could convince an unborn babe that it was going to be born with a
silver spoon in its mouth it would not exert itself to procure that
spoon.
But making all due allowance for what the babes first above mentioned
do from “policy,” it remains true that partisan editors—whose bump of
common sense is countersunk till it would hold a hen’s egg—actually
believe in the inevitable success of their ticket every time and once
more. The election comes and a half of them are shown to their readers
in the true character of persons whose judgment is not worth a pin on
any matter under the sun. The mantle of the prophet having been raped
away from the partisan editor’s shoulders, it is seen that motley is
his only wear, and his readers—themselves of equal incapacity—feel
for him ever thereafter the contempt which he made such sacrifices to
deserve. Does it teach him anything? Something Solomon hath said on
this point—something about a fool and a mortar.
The editor-person’s defense is somewhat as follows: “The income of my
paper depends not alone upon the favor of its readers, but upon that
of the party managers, and these latter certainly, if not the former,
would withhold their patronage (keeping it in the campaign fund) if
I did not ‘whoop her up.’ They believe in literary brass-banding and
fireworking. They wish to hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in every editorial
line and in all the dispatches. If I exclude from my columns news
that is not news, but the outgivings of partisan enthusiasm or the
calculated falsehoods of partisan chicanery; if, in short, I refuse to
sell dishonest goods, I lose my chance at the loaves and fishes and my
paper is deposed from its proud position as an organ.”
As to all that I have nothing to say. If a man choose to defend the
picking of others’ pockets by the plea that it fills his own, and that
if he stop his pal will no longer divide with him, the only cogent
reply that I know of is to call the police.
As to the “general reader,” who is not entirely a scoundrel nor
altogether a fool, he requires no assurances of success to keep his
courage up. In order to retain his favor it is unnecessary to seem no
wiser than himself and to share with him the dirty last ditch of his
broken hope every few years. The notion that an editor must “identify”
himself with all the wild and fallacious hopes of his readers, with
all their blind, brute prejudices and with the punishment of them, is
a discreditable tradition of the newspaper business, having nothing
in it. The traditions of every business are the creation of little,
timid men whose half-success is achieved, not by their methods, but in
spite of them, and because of the scarcity of men of brains. If these
were plentiful there would be nothing left for the traditionaries to
accomplish. The man of brains makes his success by the clarity of his
understanding: by discerning beneath the traditions the principles,
and, ignoring the former, applying the latter in his own way—which his
competitors and successors fondly believe they can imitate by following
his methods. In nothing has a great success, or rather a succession of
great successes, been made except by cutting loose from the traditions
and doing what the veteran experts gasp to observe.