Discussions of the public’s reaction to the press are two-sided, just as are discussions of the influence of the pulpit or other forces. Some authorities hold that the public mind is stubborn in regard to the press and that the press has little influence upon it. There are graphic instances of the stubbornness of the public point of view. A most interesting example is the reëlection of Mayor Hylan of New York by an overwhelming majority in the face of the opposition of all but two of the metropolitan dailies. It is also noteworthy that in 1909, Gaynor was elected Mayor of New York with every paper except one opposing his candidacy. Likewise, Mayor Mitchel of New York was defeated for reëlection in 1917, although all the New York papers except two Hearst papers and the _New York Call_ supported him. In Boston, in a recent election, a man was elected as mayor who had been convicted of a penal offense, and elected in the face of the practically united opposition of all the newspapers of that city. How would such authors as Everett Dean Martin, Walter Lippmann and Upton Sinclair explain these incidents? How, on the theory of the regimentation of the public mind by the daily press, can such thinkers explain the sharpness with which the public sometimes rejects the advocacies of a united press? These instances are not frequent; but they show that other influences beside the press enter into the making of a public opinion and that these forces must never be disregarded in the estimate of the quality and stability of a prevalent public opinion. Francis E. Leupp, writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1910, on “The Waning Power of the Press,” remarks that Mayor Gaynor’s comments shortly after his election in 1909 “led up to the conclusion that in our common sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers say.” Mr. Leupp continues: “Unflattering as such a verdict may be, probably the majority of a community if polled as a jury would concur in it. The airy dismissal of some proposition as ‘mere newspaper talk’ is heard at every social gathering until one who is brought up to regard the press as a mighty factor in modern civilization is tempted to wonder whether it has actually lost the power it used to wield among us.”