Hold fast to the Constitution.
Stand by the Stars and Stripes. Above all, stand for liberty, whatever happens.
A word that is not spoken never does any mischief.
All the goodness of a good egg cannot make up for the badness of a bad one.
If you find you have been wrong, don’t fear to say so.
All these maxims were quite as useful to the merchant as to the newspaperman. They related to the broad conduct of life. They counselled against folly, so far as the making of newspapers was concerned, but they did not convey the mysterious prescription with which Dana revived American journalism from that trance in which it had forgotten that everybody is human and that the English language is alive and fluid.
If there had been rules by which a living newspaper could be made from men and ink and wood-pulp, Dana would have known them; but there were none, nor are there now. The present editor of the Sun, E. P. Mitchell, who knew Dana better than any other man knew him, said in an address at the Pulitzer School of Journalism a few years ago:
Mr. Dana used to lecture on journalism sometimes, when he was invited, but in the bottom of my heart I don’t believe he had any theories of journalism other than common sense and free play for individual talent when discovered and available. And I do remember distinctly that when he sent Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, then fresh from St. Louis, on to Washington to report in semieditorial correspondence the critical stage of the electoral controversy of 1876, Mr. Dana did not think it necessary to instruct that correspondent to assimilate his style to the Sun’s methods and traditions. Never was a job of momentous journalistic importance better done in the absence of plain sailing directions; but that, perhaps, was due partly to the fact that Mr. Pulitzer was somewhat of an individualist himself.
For the ancient common law of journalism, as derived from England, and perhaps before that from away back in Bœotia, Mr. Dana didn’t care one comic supplement. If anybody had asked Mr. Dana to compile a set of specific directions for running a newspaper, his reply, I am sure, would have been something like this:
“Heaven bless you, young man, there aren’t any rules! Go ahead and write when you have something to say, not when you think you ought to say something. I’ll edit out the nonsense. And, by the way, unless there happens to have been born into your noddle a little bit of the native aptitude, you ought to go and be a lawyer or a farmer or a banker or a great statesman.”