permanent character their circulation will be free from the rise and
fall with which they are now only to well acquainted, and the cheap-John
business into which so many have gone, in the last few years, wheedling
the ten cents and the dollars out of the child-like poor for worthless
truck, can be thrown into the waste basket with the last offer of money
for a Wall Street editorial. It is a mistake, by the way, to think we
are a nation of readers. Man is an interesting animal where-ever found,
the desire to know what he has done and is doing is strong in us all,
but even the little county paper is beyond the reach of many. The
writer, who is a common toiler like the rest, finds the moving world a
sealed book to him, for he cannot spare the needed dollar, and live. And
those editors who will fiercely rend and tear, with all the power of
their trained brains and skilled pens, at this vital need of our times
may live to see the day when they too will believe this world is round,
and that calling the original believers fools, thieves, scoundrels,
rascals, and enemies to civilization was a repetition of an old mistake.
It will be the day when they can be our guides, philosophers, and
friends without the itching palm stuck out behind. It will be the day
when we can accept, without doubt or a curl of the lip, the admonition.
from the sixteen stories of steel, because we will then know, that the
conscience of the man within is not itself all awry.

To whatever cause the existing rot is chargeable the editor, at least of
all others, had the power to stop or check it, and failure to meet this
great responsibility shows that the strut of this great personage is
assumed, and that, like the rest, his necessities have been used by the
master to bend and break him till he no longer dare call his soul his
own.

We can expect the screech of this helpless tool to fill the land as his