about this change.
The personal ambition and the material
welfare of authors have been the strongest of them - motives pressed by Émile Zola in his address in favor of signature before the Institute of Journalists in London , September , 1893. “ To my thinking,” he urges, " when a writer does not sign his work , and becomes a mere wheel in a great machine, he ought to share the
income earned by that machine. Have you retiring pensions for your aged journalists? After they have devoted their anonymous
labour to the common task , year after year, is the bread of their
old age assured them ? If they signed their work , surely they would find their reward elsewhere ; they would have laboured for themselves. But when they have given their all, even their fame, servants whose whole life has been spent in the service of the same family .” 54
The subordination of the press to the welfare of the individuals connected with it has seemed to many a case of " putting the cart
before the horse” and to be less an argument for signature than a plea for old age pensions. In truth , the French law requiring that every article on politics, philosophy or religion shouid be signed and prescribing heavy penalities for its violation had been aimed, not at the welfare of individual journalists, but at the suppression
of the press . When the Marquis de Tinguy proposed the “ law of hate” in 1850, he replied to its opponents by saying, “ You tell me my plan will mutilate the Press , destroy its influence, take
from it its individuality? But that is precisely what I want." M . Laboulie seconded it and said , “ Wemust finish with journal
ism , as we have finished with barricades.” 55 That this end was in a measure achieved is evident from Nassau Senior who asked M . Beaumont how the law prohibiting
anonymous journalism
was received . “ Better than was ex
pected,” replied M . Beaumont. “ In the first place , it is much eluded . Every journal has some confidential subaltern whose
54 E . A . Vizetelly, Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer, pp. 330– 331. An authorized translation of the paper is given in the London Times,
September 23 , 1893. 65 James Macintyre, “ Théophraste Renaudot: Old Journalism
and
New ,” Nineteenth Century, October, 1893, 34: 596 –604 ; E . Hatin , Histoire
de la Presse en France, VIII, 630-
