An elective judiciary is slow to enforce the law against men before whom its members come every few years in the character of suppliants for favor; and how abjectly these learned candidates can sue, how basely bid for a newspaper’s support, one must have been an editor to know. The press has grown into a tyranny to which the courts themselves are servile. To rule all classes and conditions of men with an iron authority the newspapers have only to learn a single trick, against the terrible power of which, when practised by others, they “continually do cry,” with apparently never a thought of the advantage it might be to themselves—the trick of combination. This lesson once learned, Liberty may bury her own remains, for assuredly none will perform that pious office for her with impunity. It has not come to that yet, but when by virtue of controlling a newspaper a man is permitted to print and circulate thousands of copies of a slander which neither he nor any man would dare to speak before his victim’s friends a long step has been taken toward the goal of entire irresponsibility. George Augustus Sala said that from sea to sea America was woman’s kingdom, which she ruled with absolute sway. Yet in America the father does not protect his daughter, the son his mother, the brother his sister nor the husband his wife, except in the theatrical profession, by way of advertisement. The noblest and most virtuous lady in the land may be coarsely derided, her reputation stabbed, her face, figure or toilet made the subject of a scurrile jest, and no killing ensue, provided the offense be committed with such circumstances of dissemination and publicity as types alone can give it. III If the editor of a newspaper has any regard for his judgment; that is, if he has any judgment, he will not indulge in prophecy. The most conspicuous instances of the folly of predictions are those that occur in a political “campaign.” There is a venerable and hoary tradition among those ignorant persons who conduct party organs that the best and most effective way to make their party win is to assert and re-assert that it _will_. This infantile notion they act upon _ad nauseam_, and doubtless lose by it a good many votes for their party that it would otherwise receive, by making the more credulous among their readers so sure of success that they do not think it worth while to vote. If you could convince an unborn babe that it was going to be born with a silver spoon in its mouth it would not exert itself to procure that spoon.