posed to embellish their pages with his long and not very convincing
arguments against measures for national defense.
Nothing in this world is easier than for an excited individual to imagine that his failure to make a profound impression is due to some- body's prejudice or dishonesty. Many a humbug gets great space in newspapers for a season. Many a man of one idea figures briefly in the big headlines. But many a person profoundly in earnest is taken up and quickly set down again because it is found that, after all, he has no true message.
There is hardly a day that does not develop in some line of thought a man or woman, generally young, who has discovered that the inherited experience of the human race in its social and political relations is worthless. If the humdrum newspapers which deal in their ignorant way with life as it is and has been were to accept all these prophets at their self-valuations, this world would be more of a bedlam than it is.
Truth sometimes has to fight for a hearing, but never hopelessly. Folly and presumption are much more likely to receive hasty atten- tion. In most cases it is when folly and presumption have been found out and dropped that we hear of the unfriendliness of the press. Truth recognized and established presents no resolutions of thanks and throws no bouquets. Truth is the great silencer.
Professor Nearing speaks of journalism as a game, which it is not. Journalism is about as serious a profession as sober men ever engaged in. It has its eye upon the past for instruction and upon the future for inspiration guided by that instruction. We wish that Professor Nearing and all other reformers who are in a hurry could be similarly actuated.
POLITICAL ADVERTISING
A criticism brought against the newspaper is that it ought not to allow the insertion of advertisements which advocate policies directly opposed to those stated in the editorial columns. Es- pecially is this true of political advertising inserted by the party whose principles are not advocated by the paper. The justice of this charge is without foundation. It is a good thing for a Re- publican to read in his party paper the advertisements of the Democratic Party. The advertisement, being officially prepared, is positive assurance to him that its contents have not been col- ored or warped by the editorial policies of the paper: it is a yard- stick by which he may measure the accuracy of the news re- ports of the rival party. On the basis of sound advertising theory, political advertising should be given, not to papers of like policy, but to opposition papers; the advertising manager of a paper
