One comes to figure risks pretty carefully in the newspaper business. The idea of the editor at home is that he wants the maximum amount of news, with the minimum amount of risk. When a man is taking chances week in and week out, he must have some basis on which to act, for it is an axiom that a live correspondent, with a small story, is better than a dead one, with a world beat in his pocket. There is no use in a man trying for the best story in the world, if the chances are that he is going to be killed in getting it out. A man is, therefore, not expected to go after a story which he has not a fighting chance of getting away with. Once he has it, however, he is supposed to take any chances in getting it on the cable. The editors like the men who figure these things closely, and don’t get killed or shot up. Nothing is more annoying to the publisher than to send a man to the ends of the earth and fit him out for a campaign at an enormous expense, only to have him killed in the first action through excess of zeal. When this happens, the editor must write off the money spent on the man as a total loss. What is even worse, from his standpoint, is that he has probably lost his chances for covering the situation, unless indeed, he is fortunate enough to have a substitute on the field of action. It is obviously impossible to figure accurately what risks lie ahead, but it is possible to make much closer estimates than one would imagine. As a matter of fact, war risks, even for soldiers, are far less than one might imagine. But a correspondent, if he be careful, need never face a more than 4% risk, or say one chance in twenty-five. In the Russo-Japanese war, for instance, it was shown that the great bulk of killing of soldiers was from rifle and machine gun-fire, at a range of 200 yards and under. At 800 yards, which is near enough for the most enthusiastic journalist, the risk is much smaller, say one in ten or fifteen. At a mile there is not one chance in a hundred of his being killed by a rifle ball, and the shells are the only thing that need bother him. Now, in the Far Eastern war, only 6% of the entire casualties were from shell-fire, and of that 6% about nine-tenths were from shells bursting where men were bunched together or advancing to the attack in close formation. A man who joins large masses of troops runs a 6% risk, but if he keeps to himself and does not get near batteries in action, his chance of injury at a mile fades to only one in perhaps a hundred and fifty. A man often thinks he has narrowly escaped, but if he comes to estimate the matter carefully, he will find that what he thought was a close call was in matter of fact not one chance in ten. A bullet may pass within a foot of a man’s head with a most insidious hum and he assumes that he has had a close call, but if he comes to calculate that there was room between the course of this bullet and his head for forty similar ones