It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. Watching his newspapers, what has struck me most is the sheer audacity of them. Audacity is his characteristic quality, and it is a characteristic American quality—it places him among our national treasures, along with Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steamboats with the “nigger on the safety-valve.” I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that his instinct from the start was for democracy. If so, so much the better; but it is not necessary to my hypothesis. A newspaper has to have editorial opinions; and they had best be opinions that please its readers. If we are to publish a paper for the masses to read, we must also voice the hopes and the longings of the masses. So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. He seems to have done this instinctively, and without pangs. I find, what is very singular and striking, that the members of his own class hate him, not only publicly, but personally. It seems to have pleased him to defy _all_ their conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New York, he made himself a scandal in the “Tenderloin.” I was perplexed about that, for the members of our “second generation” are generally well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he spoke with real gravity: “It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was the way he did. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.” I have made clear in this book my belief that the masses are driven to revolt by the pressure of stern and ruthless economic force. They were ignorant and helpless, and among our men of wealth and power there was no one to help them—there was no one among all our intellectual leaders to voice their wrongs. They were left to help themselves—so what more natural than that it should occur to some enterprising young millionaire to leap into the breach? There was endless excitement and notoriety to be won—and at the end, perhaps, power of a new and quite incredible sort. You will observe that I am taking, deliberately, the lowest possible view. I am dealing with material conditions and picturing a material remedy for them. My point is, that whatever he may be personally, Mr. Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, to the course to which he has given himself; not only his public reputation, but his entire fortune, is in his newspapers, and the public is the master of his newspapers. He has conjured a storm which he cannot possibly control—he must play out to the end the part he has chosen.