I fancy that reporter was admitted.
CHAPTER III.—THE EDITOR OF THE PAST.
Proprietary rights—Proprietary wrongs—Exclusive rights—The “leaders” of a party—The fossil editor—The man and the dog and the boar—An unpublished history—The newspaper hoax—A premature obituary notice—The accommodating surgeon—A matter of business—The death of Mr. Robinson—The quid pro quo’.
IT is only within the past few years that the Editor has obtained public recognition as a personality; previously his personality was merged in the proprietor, and when his efforts were successful in keeping a Corporation from making fools of themselves—this is assuming an extreme case of success—or in exposing some attempted fraud that would have ruined thousands of people, he was compelled to accept his reward through the person of the proprietor. The proprietor was made a J.P., and sometimes even became Mayor or Chairman of the Board of Guardians, when the editor succeeded in making the paper a power in the county. Latterly, however, the editors of some provincial journals have been obtaining recognition.
They have been granted the dubious honour of knighthood; and the public have discovered that the brains which have dictated a policy that has influenced the destinies of a Ministry, may be entrusted with the consideration of sewage and main drainage questions on a Town Council, or with the question of the relative degrees of culpability of a man who jumps upon his wife’s face and is fined ten shillings, and the boy who steals a raw turnip and is sent to a reformatory for five years—a period quite insufficient for the adequate digestion of that comestible, which it would appear boys are ready to sacrifice years of their liberty to obtain.
I must say that, with one exception, the proprietors whom I have met were highly competent business men—men whose judgment and public spirit were deserving of that wide recognition which they nearly always obtained from their fellow-citizens. One, and one only, was not precisely of this type. He used to write with a blue pencil across an article some very funny comments.
I have before me at this moment a letter in which he asked me to abbreviate something; and he gave me an example of how to do it by cutting out a letter of the word—he spelt it abrievate.
He had a perfect passion for what he called “exclusives.” The most trivial incident—the overturning of a costermonger’s barrow, and the number of the contents sustaining fatal injuries; the blowing off of a clergyman’s hat in the street, with a professional opinion as to the damage done; the breaking of a window in a private house—he regarded as good foundation for an “exclusive”; and indeed it must be said that the information given to the public by the organ of which he was proprietor was rarely ever to be found in a rival paper. At the same time, upon no occasion of his obtaining a really important piece of news did he succeed in keeping it from the others. This annoyed him extremely He was in great demand as chairman of amateur reciting classes—a distinction that was certainly dearly purchased. I never knew of one of these reciting entertainments being refused a full report in his newspaper upon any occasion when he presided. He also aspired to the chairmanship of small political meetings, and once when he found himself in such a position, he said he would sing the audience a song, and he carried out his threat. His song was probably more convincing than his speech would have been. He had a famous story for platform use. It concerned a donkey that he knew when they were both young.