All that we have been saying respecting the fact or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter, may reach. Because a story strikes you as wonderful it does not follow that it is wonderful. You are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish the wonder of it. The procedure for the book reporter who has to describe favorably and for the book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the same. First comes the question of fact, then the citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be impossible the brief indication of the how, the where, the why of the merit reported. If the meritoriousness remains a matter of personal impression it ought so to be characterized but may warrantably be recorded where an adverse impression would go unmentioned. The presumption is in favor of the author. It should be kept so. 17 In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing millennial. But what has been outlined of the work of the true book reporter is as far as possible from what we very generally get to-day. We get unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation; we do not expect analysis but we have a right to expect straightaway exposition and a condensed transliteration of the book being dealt with. “Praise,” we have just said, and “condemnation.” That is what it is, and there is no room in the book reporter’s task either for praise or condemnation. He is not there to praise the book any more than a man is at a political convention to praise a nominating speech; he is there to describe the book, to describe the speech, to _report_ either. A newspaperman who should begin his account of a meeting in this fashion, “In a lamentably poor speech, showing evidences of hasty preparation, Elihu Root,” &c., would be fired--and ought to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard Mr. Root thought the same way about it. 18 The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news value in the book he is dealing with at the moment he is dealing with it. This needs illustration. On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books relating to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until the foreseen end came, when the interest in them would have been as great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a historical or biographical sort.