wink at it.

It is the belief of some shrewd observers that editorials, the long
editorials, are not much read, except by editors themselves. A cynic says
that, if you have a secret you are very anxious to keep from the female
portion of the population, the safest place to put it is in an editorial.
It seems to me that editorials are not conned as attentively as they once
were; and I am sure they have not so much influence as formerly. People
are not so easily or so visibly led; that is to say, the editorial
influence is not so dogmatic and direct. The editor does not expect to
form public opinion so much by arguments and appeals as by the news he
presents and his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an idea
until it becomes familiar, by the reading-matter selected, and by the
quotations of opinions as news, and not professedly to influence the
reader. And this influence is all the more potent because it is indirect,
and not perceived-by the reader.

There is an editorial tradition--it might almost be termed a
superstition--which I think will have to be abandoned. It is that a
certain space in the journal must be filled with editorial, and that some
of the editorials must be long, without any reference to the news or the
necessity of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at the moment
to fill the space with original matter that is readable. There is the
sacred space, and it must be filled. The London journals are perfect
types of this custom. The result is often a wearisome page of words and
rhetoric. It may be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much of
it. The necessity of filling this space causes the writer, instead of
stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made
perspicuous and telling, to beat it out thin, and make it cover as much
ground as possible. This, also, is vanity. In the economy of room, which