Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/347

 hopeless cause and at last see it win, as Madame Adam long promoted the policy of revanche as a means of securing the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France.

"The Editor is doomed," says a recent writer, "for the public will pay for news, and not for notions."

The editor may be doomed, but his problems still persist and will not down. The names and the times of editors might at any period be exchanged for those quite otherwise and the same troubles would still confront him,—differences in degree and differences in constituencies would not alter the basic situation. Leslie Stephen has shown that in the eighteenth century Defoe considered that the journal "supplied the initiative and leverage for all movements of political and social reform;" that Addison and Steele tried to be independent of patrons and to reflect the opinions of those about them; that Steele believed in "strong writing;" that Swift was indifferent to patronage; that Cobbett appealed to the masses; and that Leigh Hunt made journalism literature.

But in 1810 the Reverend James Beresford wrote The Twelve Labours of an Editor, separately pitted against those of Hercules. The first three of these labors he found to be "beating the devouring critic," "overcoming innumerable errors," and "grasping the meaning of his author." He found that "the editor … is to be regarded as the Enemy, and Avenger of the antisocial Passions, under the two main divisions—those of open, brutal, Fury; and deadly, poisonous malice." Another labor of the editor was pouring "his river of reformation through every contaminated stall and stye." He was to draw his "goose-quill upon the men, and welcome; but—let THE LADIES alone!" And his final labor was to expose evil.—Have the problems of the editor conspicuously changed since they were thus stated more than a century ago?

But the editorial at least is not doomed, and it takes on a new lease of life, although not necessarily of influence, as new forms of increasing its circulation are devised. Not only are the editorials of a single editor and the editorials from a single news-