“Your business ought to be ruined, from what the Court thinks of it.”
“You take my money for advertising it all right,” the protestant pointed out with justice.
“So we do. We won’t any more. The Guardian won’t carry your installment business, Mr. Levy.”
“Maybe you’re too good to have my ads in your paper at all!”
“Oh, no. We’ll be glad to have everything but that one line.”
“You can’t run my business for me, don’t you think it!” adjured Mr. Levy in one emphatic breath, and departed with a righteous conviction of unmerited injury.
The Fashion’s one-eighth pages no longer graced The Guardian. Too shrewdly devoted to his trade to stay out entirely, Mr. Levy confined himself to terse announcements in the briefest and cheapest possible space. He also helped to spread the evil rumor that young Robson was “sore on the business men of Fenchester.” Business men there were, however, shrewd, fair-minded, and far-seeing enough to appreciate The Guardian’s one-standard policy, even while they deprecated what they regarded as its abuse of independence. These formed a strong minority of defenders and supporters. Little by little their ranks were increasing. Andrew Galpin’s optimism, and the debt which represented it, seemed fairly justified as the election of the fall of 1913 drew near.
Already The Guardian had far outstripped The Record in circulation and in advertising revenue. The rival paper was being hard pressed to make a respectable showing, and had adopted a decidedly acidulous tone toward Jeremy and his publication, letting no opportunity pass to impugn its motives and jeer at its principles. Ever ready for a fight, Jeremy was for joining issue on the editorial page, but Galpin’s wiser counsel withheld him.
“Nobody cares for newspaper squabbles but newspaper men,” said that sage. “We’re not making a newspaper for newspaper men. We’re making a newspaper for Bill Smith and Jim Jones and their missises. And we’re getting ’em!”
But Jeremy Robson was making a newspaper to meet another, more demanding, more changeful standard which was yet in a great measure the same. He was making a newspaper for Jeremy Robson; for Jeremy Robson, who, with a surprised and humble and hungry mind, was being educated by that very newspaper which he himself was making. More and more Jeremy Robson, editor of The Guardian, was identifying himself in mind and spirit with Bill Smith and Jim Jones and their missises, readers and followers of The Guardian. Because of that fellowship, because of the implied link of faith and trust that had grown up, impalpable, between them, evidenced in hundreds of letters to and scores of calls upon “the editor,” there had been established standards to which The Guardian was inviolably if tacitly committed. There were things which The Guardian might not do. There were things which, when the time came, it might not refrain from doing. An implicit faith was pledged. So and not otherwise does a newspaper become an institution.