The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, “Liberty and the News”: “Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage.” That is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply her trade--which is indeed the attitude of some people in comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as “eminences on a rather flat plateau” are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann’s suggestion that our salvation lies “ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook,” is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a successful editor and writer of special articles. “In this game,” he said, “you lose your soul.”