What language, then, is our ambassador to utter, dealing with two worlds appallingly incongruous? Is it strange if, like the rest of us, he falls back upon prudential and cheery approximations? That witty writer Stella Benson mentions in one of her novels (“The Poor Man”) a character who “knew too well the difficulties and dangers of being alive to despise those who sought for safety in tremulous platitudes.” §5 Speaking of ambassadors there was one in the sixteenth century who told the following story: At Constantinople I saw an Old Man, who, after he had taken a Cup of Wine in his Hand to Drink, us’d first to make a hideous Noise; I asked his Friends, Why he did so? They answered me, that, by this Outcry, he did, as it were, warn his Soul to retire to some secret Corner of his Body, or else, wholly to Emigrate, and pass out of it, that it might not be guilty of that Sin which he was about to Commit, nor be defiled with the Wine that he was about to guzzle down. This humorous ancient was not unlike the modern newspaper man. The hideous noise of the press, its conscience-annulling haste, its sense of power and almost uncontradictable certainty,[A] are what he employs to warn his soul, his reason, not to look over his shoulder while he is at work. The fact is that the whole ingenious mechanism of a newspaper is so automatically conjointed and revolves so rapidly that by sheer fury and speed of movement it takes on a kind of synthetic life of its own. It could well be imagined thundering round and round of its own accord in a great jovial, shouting stupor. A leading editorial, tearing passions to tatters, could arise by spontaneous combustion, exhaling itself somehow from the general uproar and joy. Virgin birth would be no miracle in a newspaper office: I have seen, and myself committed, editorial matter whose parent had never been approached by any siring intelligence.