over. . . . I cannot forget the insult so readily as I might the injury of the last five years."[1]
John Stuart Mill in turn felt it necessary to send out a warning against the editorial infallibility of The Times and he wrote Motley under date of January 26, 1863: "Foreigners ought not to regard the Times as representing the English Nation . . . . The line it takes on any particular question is much more a matter of accident than is supposed. It is sometimes better than the public, and sometimes worse . . . . Unfortunately these papers (the Times and the Saturday Review], through the influence they obtain in other ways, and in the case of the Times very much in consequence of the prevailing notion that it speaks the opinions of all England, are able to exercise great power in perverting the opinions of England whenever the public is sufficiently ignorant of facts to be misled."[2]
Even Englishmen grew restive under the editorial dominance of The Times and a long correspondence between Cobden and Delane followed the misrepresentations in a Times leader to the effect that John Bright had excited discontent among the poor, and had proposed "a division among them of the lands of the rich." Cobden called on Delane by name to withdraw the baseless imputation, and when Delane refused to publish the letter of Cobden's in The Times, the latter published the correspondence in the Rochdale Observer. The question at issue between the two was the refusal of The Times to admit that it had been in error, as it clearly had been, and Cobden's insistence it should apologize and retract its imputations.[3]
This attitude of infallibility and omniscience has almost inevitably been modified by the changes that have affected the paper as a whole. The principle of division of labor has entered the editorial columns as it has the business office, and the editor who himself once wrote on every subject now engages specialists to write editorials in their own special field and the editorial office may expand to include half a continent. William Lloyd Garrison became "Journalist at Large" after his work on the Liberator
