Or, in the case of the reporter, painfully trained in a generous human skepticism, enforced student of the way people behave and the way things happen, alert to discern the overtones of irony and pathos in the event, you might expect him to be the least credulous of beings. If so, the general flavour of the press little represents him. He acquiesces, consciously or unconsciously, in the fact that in all but a few really intelligent journals the news columns are edited down to the level of the proprietor’s intelligence, or what the active managers imagine to be the proprietor’s taste. Not in facts, but in the tone adopted in setting out those facts. An Index Expurgatorius is issued for office guidance, lists made of words and phrases not to be mentioned in news stories. The more essentially vulgar a paper is, the more cautious it will be not to use words the managing editor believes dirty. “Obscene,” for example, is deleted, and the truly disgusting word “spicy” is substituted. And the reporter himself having acquiesced, it is not unnatural that the readers of the paper do also. The great majority of them, tippling their customary sheet day after day with the regularity of dram-fiends, are so indurated to the grotesque psychology of the more popular news columns that to find a paper habitually speaking recognizable moderate sense would afflict them with a warmth of indecency and dismay. The daily journals give them the same pleasure that the serial parts of Dickens’s novels gave the early Victorians eighty and ninety years ago. So we have the agreeable paradox that these papers we see all round us, roaring their naïvetés and scandals, are written and compiled by those who are, as individuals, studious, serene, and gently acetic skeptics.