The Hon. Clark Howell closes his feeble editorial by making a side-thrust at this Magazine as “a subsidiary company to Town Topics.”
As to that, the answer is swift and to the point.
I am this Magazine.
Not a line can go into it to which I object. Not a line can be kept out of it to which I put my approval. My contract gives the control of the Magazine to me completely. What more could anybody exact? That Town Topics owns a majority of the stock is true. But Town Topics has no more rights over the Magazine itself than the Atlanta Constitution has.
Tom Lawson, or H. H. Rogers, or Judge Parker, or W. J. Bryan might buy a majority of the stock. I could not prevent that. But nobody can interfere with my control of the Magazine.
I have no doubt that Mr. Clark Howell envies me my independence. It is extremely doubtful whether he can say for himself and his paper what I have said for myself and the magazine.
I shouldn’t wonder if he held his place upon the condition that his paper must be railroad. He wouldn’t dare to have an opinion unfavorable to railroad. When he sits down to write editorials, I compare him in my own mind to the little girl going to the piano to practice her music-lesson. She is a good little girl, and she follows the notes. She improvises no music. She puts out her trained fingers and she touches, one by one, with painful fidelity, the notes written down on the score. She couldn’t think of striking any note which was not written down on the score. Dear little thing!
Day after day, month after month, year after year, the trained fingers strike the notes indicated in the lesson. If by chance she hits a chord not on the book, there’s a rap and a sharp word of reproof from the authority which presides over the “practice.”
“What’s that?” comes the cry of the teacher or parent, and the little girl, frightened at the false note, hurriedly gets back to the written score.