Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/329

 The situation has seemed to others comparable to that of the stenographer who takes dictation and transcribes his notes on the typewriter,—a process that involves no ethical demand for an agreement between what he has written and his own personal beliefs. Certainly in the early days of the newspaper, when Grub Street flourished, writers for periodicals were considered in much this light. Men wrote with equal facility on both sides of a question, and they are condemned to-day. But inventions have not shifted the responsibility from the human to the metal machine and while the early editor was apparently not over-sensitive to a condition that demanded that his right hand should not know what his left hand wrote, he can no longer plead this justification. If he continues his connection with a paper whose policies have changed, he does so with a full realization of the principle involved. "The Pall Mall Gazette has always been more remarkable for its influence upon opinion than for its commercial success," was a general belief once expressed in print. Its influence was undoubtedly explained, at least in large part, by the absolute certainty of its readers that its leaders expressed the personal convictions of its editors. While Frederick Greenwood was its editor, he had personally opposed the policies of Gladstone. This led to a rupture with the proprietor, and therefore to changes, and to demands that Greenwood could not meet and as a matter of personal honor he resigned. When Zola, in addressing English journalists, "likened some journalists to mere writing-machines at the beck and call of a superior," he was reminded that "on two occasions when there had been a change in the proprietorship of the Pall Mall Gazette the editors and the bulk of their staff had quitted the paper to uphold their opinions elsewhere," while later "during the Boer war, various editors and others threw up their posts rather than write contrary to their convictions."

The situation was reversed when Bernard Gillam drew caricatures of the Republican presidential candidate for Puck in 1884. Early in the campaign Judge was started by Republicans to counteract the influence of Puck "and Gillam went over to the