As to the “general reader,” who is not entirely a scoundrel nor altogether a fool, he requires no assurances of success to keep his courage up. In order to retain his favor it is unnecessary to seem no wiser than himself and to share with him the dirty last ditch of his broken hope every few years. The notion that an editor must “identify” himself with all the wild and fallacious hopes of his readers, with all their blind, brute prejudices and with the punishment of them, is a discreditable tradition of the newspaper business, having nothing in it. The traditions of every business are the creation of little, timid men whose half-success is achieved, not by their methods, but in spite of them, and because of the scarcity of men of brains. If these were plentiful there would be nothing left for the traditionaries to accomplish. The man of brains makes his success by the clarity of his understanding: by discerning beneath the traditions the principles, and, ignoring the former, applying the latter in his own way—which his competitors and successors fondly believe they can imitate by following his methods. In nothing has a great success, or rather a succession of great successes, been made except by cutting loose from the traditions and doing what the veteran experts gasp to observe. IV Some years ago—as lately as the presidential contest between Cleveland and Blaine—it was a cast-iron tradition of journalism that personal defamation was a necessary and effective aid to success. True, every newspaper deprecated it in a general way, and rose at it, shrieking when it hurt; but nearly all practised it and always had done so. Every political campaign was a disgraceful welter of detraction and calumniation. To snout out a candidate’s “personal record,” and if it was found clean befoul it—that was what the partisan editor regarded as his first and highest duty to his party. The besmirching of candidates was a tradition sacred and inviolable; it is now a dead practice, and we have probably seen the last campaign of mud-slinging. The thing might advantageously have been stopped at any time. The people did not demand it; they were as decent then as now. The case was that newspaper men did not know their business; and in respect of many other disreputable survivals they do not know it now. I could name a full dozen newspaper traditions now in full and strenuous vitality that are as needless and mischievous as the vilification of candidates. They will all die hard, but die they must, for the world will finally fall into the sun, which will consume them. V