–168.
Brodrick to accept with hesitation and with many qualifications
the tendency away from anonymity.60 Reinach also deprecated believing that it developed individualism and amour propre and led to exaggeration and scandal, and that the press should en courage anonymity .01
It must also be remembered that many persons prefer to pub lish their articles anonymously because they write “ to free their
minds,” rather than to influence public opinion. They realize that articles without a nameattached to them are often not read
and seldom attract notice, but since their object is attained by publication , this, to such writers, is immaterial. To Schopenhauer the status quo was always black and he held that “ Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic
rascality . It is a practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a newspaper , should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the editor should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The freedom of the
press should be thus far restricted ; so that what a man publicly 60 G . C . Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 1831 to 1900 , pp . 135 - 142. The special reasons that he gives seem to sum up the question particularly well. “ I felt a satisfaction ," he says, “ in knowing that no reader, lighting
upon an article of mine, could put it aside as the work of a young man with little experience or authority, but that, if he cared to read it at all, hemust needs judge it upon its merits .
This is, in my opinion , the supreme advan
tage of anonymous journalism . It seems to me quite right that periodicals should admit signed articles, and I now prefer myself to write under my own name; but when
I remember all the rubbish which I have read with an
eminent signature attached to it, probably commanding a fancy price and an immense audience, I realize how much is gained by compelling the public to read the comments of the Daily Press with a more or less open mind .” While he was not so free to set forth every shade of his own inner most convictions as if he had been writing under his own name, he was not sure that his articles lost much in force by this limited suppression of indi
viduality , with its besetting temptations of personal vanity , especially since “ it is not always one's best thoughts which clamour most loudly for expression .”
Edward L . Bulwer gives all the arguments used for anonymity and, by refuting them all, favors signature. - England and the English, II, 15- 26 . Dibblee maintains that writers who prefer signature " arenot permanently destined for journalism ” and he favors anonymity both for the sake of the
journalist himself and for the newspaper as well. — The Newspaper, pp. 102 104 .
61 J. Reinach , “ Parisian Newspapers,” Nineteenth Century, September, 1882, 12: 347
