for cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a five-shilling stick, strong enough to break heads of the ordinary thickness, and like quite as well to appeal to an antagonist's fears as to his mercy.' _The Witness_ started with a circulation of six hundred. Its position among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater proof of the personality of the editor and the quality of 'the leaders' remains than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the great mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, but Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people seized on the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from themselves, and his christian name was as familiar as his surname. Yet, curiously enough, from first to last he never believed in the profession of an editor, and from the 'new-journalism' of the paragraph and the leaderette he would have turned in disdain. Nothing but the fact that he felt convinced of his mission would have induced him to leave Cromarty for the post. 'I have been,' he could truly say, 'an honest journalist. I have never once given expression to an opinion which I did not conscientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at the time at least, I did not believe to be true.' He never mastered, or felt it necessary to master, the routine details of the business, for the paper was read not for its Parliamentary reports, or the exposition of party politics, but for the essays, sketches, or leaders which were known to be by him. Accordingly the mere fluent production of 'copy,' and the diurnal serving up of the editorial thunder by which the members of the fourth estate fondly delude themselves that they lead public opinion, never really came naturally to him. He prepared himself carefully for his work; and perhaps the bi-weekly issue of the paper and its peculiar nature lessened the strain upon the editor. His successor in the editorial chair of the paper, Dr. Peter Bayne, in the preface to Miller's _Essays_ (1862) says: