Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/351

Rh old standards, every prominent newspaper published today is a compromise with the ideals of its editor. The man of great parts as an editorial writer has but little tolerance for the unrealities of things generally, for the attractive side-lights of life that appeal so strongly to the lesser man. On broad issues as affecting the destiny or the happiness of a people as a whole, he sees clearly. His vision as a forecast of future events carries him to heights that the men groping in the depths of material things can not hope to scale. He is ahead of his day, and just so far ahead as he may be of contemporary men and contemporary things, just so far is he out of close touch with the interests from which his paper derives

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its principal support. He is seldom a popular man, and his cause has the weakness which we always find sooner or later where a following ties its destinies to individual leadership. It is in new and not too thickly populated countries that the editorial utterances of a strong paper have most force in shaping the public opinion of a community that may be the seat of its publication.

All of this, however, can not detract from force of editorial utterance on any big paper. A man must have some strength of individuality to succeed, and a paper must have character to be respected. The moral force a paper may exert in any community is found in the character and ability of its editorials. The great editors of the country in the past have been few. Knowledge alone does not make an editorial writer. A man may be a walking cyclopaedia of information, and yet be as dry and as musty in his makeup as are the volumes he has pored over, and as lacking in inspiration for real accomplishment in newspaper work as the average graduate of a journalistic college. The combination of knowledge, strength of individuality, character and magnetic force that will permit a man to say a thing or write a thing that a large following will regularly give ear to, is exceedingly rare. When such a man is found he is strong enough to defy all laws of conduct. As a writer, either on the editorial force of the Oregonian, or on a metropolitan paper in the largest Eastern populated centers, he will make his presence felt. Of the great editors of the country's history, Chas. A. Dana was as much of a politician as he was a journalist. Even in his best days on the New York Sun, its circulation, compared with