It was in discussing this that I discovered that Hobart couldn’t discuss.  He could talk; he could assert, produce opinions and information, but he couldn’t meet or answer arguments.  And he was cautious, afraid of committing himself, afraid, I fancied, of exposing gulfs in his equipment of information, for, like other journalists of his type, his habit was to write about things of which he knew little.  Old Pinkerton remarked once, at a dinner to American newspaper men, that his own idea of a good journalist was a man who could sit down at any moment and write a column on any subject.  The American newspaper men cheered this; it was their idea of a good journalist too.  It is an amusing game, and one encouraged by the Anti-Potterite League, to waylay leader-writers and tackle them about their leaders, turn them inside out and show how empty they are.  I’ve written that sort of leader myself, of course, but not for the Fact; we don’t allow it.  There, the man who writes is the man who knows, and till some one knows no one writes.  That is why some people call us dry, heavy, lacking in ideas, and say we are like a Blue Book, or a paper read to the British Association.  We are proud of that reputation.  The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we are out for facts.

Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person.  All he had was a flair for the popular point of view.  That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got hold of him.  He was a true Potterite.  Possibly I always saw him at his least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn’t like me and knew I didn’t like him.  Even then there had already been one or two rather acrimonious disputes between my paper and his on points of fact.  The Daily Haste hated being pinned down to and quarrelled with about facts; facts didn’t seem to the Pinkerton press things worth quarrelling over, like policy, principles, or prejudices.  The story goes that when any one told old Pinkerton he was wrong about something, he would point to his vast circulation, using it as an argument that he couldn’t be mistaken.  If you still pressed and proved your point, he would again refer to his circulation, but using it this time as an indication of how little it mattered whether his facts were right or wrong.  Some one once said to him curiously, ‘Don’t you care that you are misleading so many millions?’ To which he replied, in his dry little voice, ’I don’t lead, or mislead, the millions.  They lead me.’  Little Pinkerton sometimes saw a long way farther into what he was doing than you’d guess from his shoddy press.  He had queer flashes of genius.

But Hobart hadn’t.  Hobart didn’t see anything, except what he was officially paid to see.  A shallow, solemn ass.

I looked suddenly at Jane, and caught her watching her husband silently, with her considering, dispassionate look.  He was talking to the American Legation about the traffic strike (we were a round table, and the talk was general).