What impressed me most was the peculiar character of the city and the newspaper world here, the more or less somnolent nature of its population (apart from the steel companies and their employees) and the genial and sociable character of the newspaper men. Never had I encountered more intelligent or helpful or companionable albeit cynical men than I found here. They knew the world, and their opportunities for studying public as well as private impulses and desires and contrasting them with public and private performances were so great as to make them puzzled if not always accurate judges of affairs and events. One can always talk to a newspaper man, I think, with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush. Nearly everything in connection with those trashy romances of justice, truth, mercy, patriotism, public profession of all sorts, is already and forever gone if they have been in the business for any length of time. The religionist is seen by them for what he is: a swallower of romance or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment. Of the politician, they know or believe but one thing: that he is out for himself, a trickster artfully juggling with the moods and passions and ignorance of the public. Judges are men who have by some chance or other secured good positions and are careful to trim their sails according to the moods and passions of the strongest element in any community or nation in which they chance to be. The arts are in the main to be respected, when they are not frankly confessed to be enigmas.