Last winter, when the aldermen had undertaken to grant a perpetual franchise for the use of the streets to a light, fuel and power company, the _Journal_ served injunctions upon the board and prevented the outrage. At the same time it fought at Albany for dollar gas with such success that even Mr. Platt’s Legislature was compelled to yield to public opinion to the extent of passing a bill providing for a general reduction. The practice of invoking the law against unfaithful public servants has been repeated recently with signal success in the case of Commissioner of Public Works Collis and his pet contractors, who have been compelled to raise the siege of Fifth Avenue. When the East River murder seemed an insoluble mystery to the police, the _Journal_ organised a detective force of its own, and in two or three days identified the victim, Guldensuppe, and his assassins. And when the Long Island Railroad attempted to excuse its wholesale manslaughter at Valley Stream by alleging that an engine could be seen for a distance of one thousand five hundred feet, the _Journal_ took a counterpart of the wrecked tally-ho outfit to the scene, and proved by actual measurement that the driver could not have seen the approaching train until his leaders were on the track, with the engine eighty-four feet away. These are a few of the public services by which the _Journal_ has illustrated its theory that a newspaper’s duty is not confined to exhortation, but that when things are going wrong it should itself set them right if possible. The brilliant exemplication of this theory in the rescue of Miss Cisneros has finally commended it to the approval of almost the entire reading world. [Illustration: RIVERSIDE DRIVE AND GRANT’S TOMB.] These things, all of them, or almost all, are good. Some of them are very good. But all of them together do not prove that in Mr. Hearst we have the man of whom Mr. Lowell spoke when he said:-- Methinks the editor who should understand his calling and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title of ποιμὴν λαῶν, which Homer bestows upon princes, he would be the Moses of our nineteenth century ... the Captain of our Exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order.