Page:Soseki - Botchan (1918).djvu/265

 . The principal, with the face like a badger and always swaggering, is surprisingly wanting in influence. He has not even as much power as to bring down a country newspaper, which had printed a false story. I was so thoroughly indignant that I declared I would go alone to the office and see the editor-in-chief on the subject, but Badger said no.

“If you go there and have a blowup with the editor,” he continued, “it would only mean of your being handed out worse stuff in the paper again. Whatever is published in a paper, right or wrong, nothing can be done with it.” And he wound up with a remark that sounded like a piece of sermon by a Buddhist bonze that “We must be contented by speedily despatching the matter from our minds and forgetting it.”

If newspapers are of that character, it would be beneficial for us all to have them suspended,–the sooner the better. The similarity of the unpleasant sensation of being written-up in a paper and being