One indirect effect that is not unworthy of notice in the new system is its tendency to narrow the openings for the writer by profession.  If an article is to be signed, the editor will naturally seek the name of an expert of special weight and competence on the matter in hand.  A reviewer on the staff of a famous journal once received for his week’s task, General Hamley on the Art of War, a three-volume novel, a work on dainty dishes, and a translation of Pindar.  This was perhaps taxing versatility and omniscience over-much, and it may be taken for granted that the writer made no serious contribution to tactics, cookery, or scholarship.  But being a man of a certain intelligence, passably honest, and reasonably painstaking, probably he produced reviews sufficiently useful and just to answer their purpose.  On the new system we should have an article on General Hamley’s work by Sir Garnet Wolseley, and one on the cookery-book from M. Trompette.  It is not certain that this is all pure gain.  There is a something to be said for the writer by profession, who, without being an expert, will take trouble to work up his subject, to learn what is said and thought about it, to penetrate to the real points, to get the same mastery over it as an advocate or a judge does over a patent case or a suit about rubrics and vestments.  He is at least as likely as the expert to tell the reader all that he wants to know, and at least as likely to be free from bias and injurious prepossession.

Nor does experience, so far as it has yet gone, quite bear out Mr. Lewes’s train of argument that the “first condition of all writing is sincerity, and that one means of securing sincerity is to insist on personal responsibility,” and that this personal responsibility can only be secured by signing articles.  The old talk of “literary bravoes,” “men in masks,” “anonymous assassins,” and so forth, is out of date.  Longer experience has only confirmed the present writer’s opinion, expressed here from the very beginning:  “Everybody who knows the composition of any respectable journal in London knows very well that the articles which those of our own way of thinking dislike most intensely are written by men whom to call bravoes in any sense whatever would be simply monstrous.  Let us say, as loudly as we choose, if we see good reason, that they are half informed about some of the things which they so authoritatively discuss; that they are under strong class feeling; that they have not mastered the doctrines which they are opposing; that they have not sufficiently meditated their subject; that they have not given themselves time to do justice even to their scanty knowledge.  Journalists are open to charges of this kind; but to think of them as a shameless body, thirsting for the blood of better men than themselves, or ready to act as an editor’s instrument for money, involves a thoroughly unjust misconception.”