Human interest! It is an old phrase now, and one likely to cause lips to curl along Park Row. But the art of picking out the happenings of every-day life that would appeal to every reader, if so depicted that the events lived before the reader’s eye, was an art that did not exist until Dana came along. Ben Day knew the importance of the trifles of life and the hold they took on the people who read his little _Sun_, but it remained for Dana to bring out in journalism the literary quality that made the trifle live. Whether it was an item of three lines or an article of three columns, it must have life, or it had no place in the _Sun_. Dana did not teach his men how to do it. If he taught them anything, it was what not to do. His men did the work he wanted them to do, not by following instructions, but by being unhampered by instructions. He set the writer free and let him go his own way to glory or failure. There were no conventions except those of decency, of respect for the English language. Because newspapermen had been doing a certain thing in a certain way for a century, Dana could not see why he and his men should go in the same wagon-track. With a word or an epigram he destroyed traditions that had fettered the profession since the days of the Franklin press. One day he held up a string of proofs--a long obituary of Bismarck, or Blaine, or some celebrity who had just passed away. “Mr. Lord,” he said to his managing editor, “isn’t that a lot of space to give to a dead man?” Yet the next day the same Dana came from his office to the city editor’s desk to inquire who had written a certain story two inches long, and, upon learning, went over to the reporter who was the author. “Very good, young man, very good,” he said, pointing to the item. “I wish I could write like that!” Names of writers meant nothing to Dana. He judged everything that was printed in the _Sun_, or offered to it for publication, on its own merits. He went through manuscript with uncanny speed, the gaze that seemed to travel only down the centre of the page really taking in the whole substance. A dull article from a celebrity he returned to its envelope with the note “Respectfully declined,” and without a thought of the author’s surprise, or possibly rage. But over a poem from an up-State unknown he might spend half an hour if the verses contained the germ of an idea new to him. One clergyman who had come into literary prominence offered to write some articles for the _Sun_. Dana told him he might try. The clergyman evidently had a notion that the _Sun’s_ cleverness was a worldly, reckless devilishness, and he adapted the style of his first article to what he supposed was the tone of the paper. Dana read it, smiled, wrote across the first page “This is too damned wicked,” and mailed it back to the misguided author.