A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial, political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice. The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the American people. It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were, marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless vigilance is needed to keep them together.