“There is no such thing in America as an independent press unless it is in the country towns. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dare express an honest opinion. If you express it, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 per week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of the New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and race for his daily bread; or for what is about the same thing, his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an ‘independent press.’ We are tools, and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, all are the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.” It is hardly probable that any one not himself accustomed to drafting headlines could have so far exaggerated a situation, even under post-prandial influences, as did the author of the above paragraph. Whatever may be the measure of the sinning of any newspaper, certainly no single sheet has ever been the corrupt apologist for all anti-social interests. A paper which at any one time should attempt to stand for unsanitary tenement houses, for child labour, for quack medicines, for “embalmed” beef, for “tainted money” colleges, for monopoly tactics in beating down small competitors, for life insurance frauds, for the spoils system, the stealing of elections, and franchise grabbing,—or for any considerable number of these,—would certainly lose its influence with extreme suddenness. Newspapers are of all kinds, of course. They differ even more in character than do individuals. As the focal points of every interest in a community the interests of a newspaper are much more diverse than those of the individual, and, as in the case of the individual, these interests are shot through and through with the noble and the base. Few people who are unfamiliar with the practical making of newspapers realise what a constant and bitter struggle is being waged in many cases to keep them free from selfish and dishonest influences. In other instances, of course, the partial triumph of the counting-room is palpable. Advertising columns still carry, although with much less frequency than formerly, the insertions of get-rich-quick schemes, of bucket-shops, of salary-loan sharks, of quack doctors, quack medicines, and clairvoyants. Of course these are frankly presented as paid matter, and every reader of