print at wearisome length accounts of obscure Catholic clerical scandals
on the Continent, and would sweat with alarm if his sub-editors had
admitted a telegram concerning the trial of some fraudulent Protestant
missionary or other in China.

Meanwhile his rather dull paper was being bought by you and me, and bank
clerks and foreign tourists, and doctors, and publicans, and brokers,
Catholics, Protestants, atheists, "peculiar people," and every kind of
man for many reasons--because it had the best social statistics, because
it had a very good dramatic critic, because they had got into the habit
and couldn't stop, because it came nearest to hand on the bookstall. Of
a hundred readers, ninety-nine skipped the clerical scandal and either
chuckled over the fraudulent missionary or were bored by him and went on
to the gambling news from the Stock Exchange. But the type for whom all
that paper was produced, the menacing god or demon who was supposed to
forbid publication of certain news in it, did not exist.

So it was with the second paper, but with this difference, that the
editor was right about the social position of those who read his sheet,
but quite wrong about the opinions and emotions of people in that social
position.

It was all the more astonishing from the fact that the editor was born
in that very class himself and perpetually mixed with it. No one perhaps
read "The Stodge" (for under this device would I veil the true name of
the organ) more carefully than those retired officers of either service
who are to be found in what are called our "residential" towns. The
editor was himself the son of a colonel of guns who had settled down in
a Midland watering-place. He ought to have known that world, and he did
know that world, but he kept his illusion of his Public quite apart from