Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/253

 of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the suggestion imperiously aside, and he said:

"Four days, and it'll all be over. That's the life of a newspaper sensation."

I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial, and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end, unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe, that good news is no news.

I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of raising the issue of local self government, and of raising it in such a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power, though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor's office after that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor in a