A scientific magazine in like manner must have some one to back it--a firm
of patent-office brokers or a scientific society. The daily papers depend
almost wholly on their advertisements; the public would not buy a simple
compilation of the day's news at a fair profit. Even our great
institutions of higher education give their students more than the latter
pay for; the student is getting part of his tuition for nothing. A college
that depends wholly on tuition fees for its support is soon left without
students. Thus all these disseminators of ideas are not dependent on the
persons to whom they distribute those ideas, for whose interest it is that
the ideas shall be good and true and selected with discrimination. They
depend rather for support on outside bodies of various kinds and so tend
to be controlled by them--bodies whose interests do not necessarily
coincide with those of the public. This is not true of material things.
Their distributors still strive to please the public, for it is by the
public that they are supported. If the public wants raspberry jam,
raspberry jam it gets; and if, being aroused, it demands that this shall
be made out of raspberries instead of apples, dock-seeds and aniline, it
ultimately has its way. But if the department store were controlled by
some outside agency, benevolent or otherwise, which partly supported it
and enabled it to sell its wares below cost, then if this controlling
agency willed that we should eat dock-seeds and aniline--dock-seeds and
aniline we should doubtless eat.

Not that the controlling powers in all these instances are necessarily
malevolent. The publisher who owns a literary magazine may honestly desire
that it shall be fearlessly impartial. The learned body that runs a
scientific periodical may be willing to admit to its pages a defense of a
thesis that it has condemned in one of its meetings; the page-advertiser
in a great daily may be able to see his pet policy attacked in its
editorial columns without yielding to the temptation to bring pressure to