Moreover, they are as far removed as the poles from the apostles of that hideous yellow journalism which makes a cult of the mendacious, the sensational, and the inane, and which, throughout its wide but vapid field, does as much to vulgarize and degrade the popular taste, to weaken the popular character, and to dull the edge of the popular conscience, as any influence under which the country can suffer. These men sneer at the very idea of paying heed to the dictates of a sound morality; as one of their number has cynically put it, they are concerned merely with selling the public whatever the public will buy――a theory of conduct which would justify the existence of every keeper of an opium den, of every foul creature who ministers to the vices of mankind. Here, again, it is perhaps not especially to the credit of Dr. Abbott and his associates that they have avoided this pit; fortunately, they are so constituted that it is a simple impossibility for them to fall into it. But they do deserve very great credit for avoiding another type of temptation which has much fascination for men of cultivation and of refined taste, and which is quite as fatal to their usefulness as indulgence in yellow journalism. A newspaper or periodical which avoids vulgar sensationalism, which takes and cultivates an interest in serious matters, and things literary, artistic, and scientific――which, in short, appeals to people of taste, intelligence, and cultivation――may nevertheless do them grave harm, and be within its own rather narrow limits an element of serious mischief; for it may habitually and consistently practice a malign and slanderous untruthfulness which, though more refined than, is at least as immoral as, the screaming sensationalism of any representative of the journalism which it affects to despise. A cultivated man of good intelligence who has acquired the knack of saying bitter things, but who lacks the robustness which will enable him to feel at ease among strong men of action, is apt, if his nature has in it anything of meanness or untruthfulness, to strive for a reputation in what is to him the easiest way. He can find no work which is easier――and less worth doing――than to sit in cloistered aloofness from the men who wage the real and important struggles of life and to endeavor, by an unceasing output of slander in regard to them, to bolster up his own uneasy desire to be considered superior to them. Now a paper edited by men of this stamp does not have much popular influence, and therefore is less detrimental to the people at large than yellow journalism; but it may, to the extent of its power, exert a very real influence for evil, by the way in which it teaches young men of good education, whose talents should be at their country’s service, that decent and upright public men are as properly subjects of foul attack as the most debased corruptionist; that efficiency and wickedness are interchangeable;