The internal conduct of the press thus in part explains the apparently waning power of the editorial.
But a far more important group of causes has been put forth and has been vigorously upheld.
The decline of the editorial is most often attributed to the changes in the business administration of the newspaper. The substitution of the impersonal corporation for the personal owner has necessarily affected adversely the importance of the editorial. The frequent changes in policy that are inevitable when the editor becomes to a certain extent dependent on the corporation tends to uncertainty in the conduct of the editorial page. The growing importance of the business manager, the introduction of what has been termed "the department-store idea," the investment of large capital on which returns are expected—all combine on the business side to limit the influence of the editor.
Yet the problem of what should be the mutual relations between owner and editor and the complaint that each interferes with the other are probably as old as the periodical press itself. The owner may have been termed a patron, the press may have been controlled by a political party, the editor may have been called a hack writer,—whatever the designation applied to the party of either the first or the second part, the friction that has existed between those who hold the purse strings and those in their employ has been well understood . Defoe's difficulties with Fog, Applebee and Mist, have been set forth by all of his biographers. Addison and Steele strove for independence of their patrons, not always successfully. Walpole and his ministry worked through political pamphlets, the Opposition through newspapers.[1]
In the early nineteenth century, William Jerdan writes of his difficulties in conducting the Aurora under the management of a committee of fashionable hotel-keepers and the landlords of the principal inns and taverns at the West End of London,—one was ultra-Tory, one loyal but moderate, one favored the Church, and one the Roman Catholic Church; one was warlike, one a pacifist, one democratic, and one seditious. The editor was therefore al-
- ↑ Milton Percival, Political Ballads Illustrating the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, p. xiii.
