or twisted or belied, and it still further reduced my estimate of humanity. Men, as I was beginning to find—all of us—were small, irritable, nasty in their struggle for existence. This little editor, for instance, was not interested in the Democratic party (which this paper was supposed to represent), or indeed in party principles of any kind. He did not believe what he wrote, but, receiving forty dollars a week, he was anxious to make a workmanlike job of it. Just at this time he was engaged in throwing mud at the national Republican administration, the mayor and the governor, as well as various local politicians, whom the owner of the paper wished him to attack. What a pitiful thing journalism or our alleged “free press” was, I then and there began to gather—dimly enough at first I must admit. What a shabby compound of tricky back-room councils, public professions, all looking to public favors and fames which should lead again to public contracts and financial emoluments! Journalism, like politics, as I was now soon to see, was a slough of muck in which men were raking busily and filthily for what their wretched rakes might uncover in the way of financial, social, political returns. I looked at this dingy office and then at this little yellow-haired rat of an editor one afternoon as he worked, and it came to me what a desperately subtle and shifty thing life was. Here he was, this little runt, scribbling busily, and above him were strong, dark, secretive men, never appearing publicly perhaps but paying him his little salary privately, dribbling it down to him through a publisher and an editor-in-chief and a managing editor, so that he might be kept busy misconstruing, lying, intellectually cheating.