Who is to determine what is significant and what is not? Who is to decide which of the individual’s relations to the community are safeguarded by his right of privacy and which are not? Such a definition tells us nothing more definite than does the slogan which it attempts to define. We must look further for a standard by which these definitions are applied. There must be a consensus of public opinion on which the newspaper falls back for its standards. The truth is that while it appears to be forming the public opinion on fundamental matters, the press is often conforming to it. It is the office of the public relations counsel to determine the interaction between the public, and the press and the other mediums affecting public opinion. It is as important to conform to the standards of the organ which projects ideas as it is to present to this organ such ideas as will conform to the fundamental understanding and appreciation of the public to which they are ultimately to appeal. There is as much truth in the proposition that the public leads institutions as in the contrary proposition that the institutions lead the public. As an illustration of the manner in which newspapers are inclined to accept the judgments of their readers in presenting material to them, we have this anecdote which Rollo Ogden tells in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1906, about a letter which Wendell Phillips wished to have published in a Boston paper. “The editor read it over, and said, ‘Mr. Phillips, that is a very good and interesting letter, and I shall be glad to publish it; but I wish you would consent to strike out the last paragraph.’ “‘Why,’ said Phillips, ‘that paragraph is the precise thing for which I wrote the whole letter. Without that it would be pointless.’ “‘Oh, I see that,’ replied the editor; ‘and what you say is perfectly true! I fully agree with it all myself. Yet it is one of those things which it will not do to say publicly. However, if you insist upon it, I will publish it as it stands.’ “It was published the next morning, and along with it a short editorial reference to it, saying that a letter from Mr. Phillips would be found in another column, and that it was extraordinary that so keen a mind as his should have fallen into the palpable absurdity contained in the last paragraph.” Recognition of this fact comes from a number of different sources. H. L. Mencken recognizes that the public runs the press as much as the press runs the public. “The primary aim of all of them,” says Mr. Mencken,[8] “not less when they play the secular Iokanaan than when they play the mere newsmonger, was to please the crowd, and to give a good show; and the way they set about giving that good show was by first selecting a deserving victim, and then putting him magnificently to the torture.