There lies before me a letter written some years ago to a young lady anxious to enter on this particular “career of letters,”—­a letter from an experienced New York journalist.  He has employed, he says, hundreds of lady correspondents, for little or no compensation; and one of his few successful writers he thus describes:  “She succeeds by pushing her way into society, and extracting information from fashionable people and officials and their wives....  She flatters the vain, and overawes the weak, and gets by sheer impudence what other writers cannot....  I would not wish you to be like her, or reduced to the necessity of doing what she does, for any success journalism can possibly give.”  And who can help echoing this opinion?  If this is one of the successful laborers, where shall we place the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or failure, the greater honor?

Personal journalism has a prominence in this country with which nothing in any other country can be compared.  What is called publicity in England or France means the most peaceful seclusion, compared with the glare of notoriety which an enterprising correspondent can flash out at any time—­as if by opening the bull’s-eye of a dark lantern—­upon the quietest of his contemporaries.  It is essentially an American institution, and not one of those in which we have reason to feel most pride.  It is to be observed, however, that foreigners, if in office, take to it very readily; and it is said that no people cultivate the reporters at Washington more assiduously than the diplomatic corps, who like to send home the personal notices of themselves, in order to prove to their governments that they are highly esteemed in the land to which they are appointed.  But however it may be with them, it is certain that many people still like to keep their public and private lives apart, and shrink from even the inevitable eminence of fame.  One of the very most popular of American authors has said that he never, to this day, has overcome a slight feeling of repugnance on seeing his own name in print.

TALKING AND TAKING

Every time a woman does anything original or remarkable,—­inventing a rat-trap, let us say, or carving thirty-six heads on a walnut-shell,—­all observers shout applause.  “There’s a woman for you, indeed!  Instead of talking about her rights, she takes them.  That’s the way to do it.  What a lesson to these declaimers upon the platform!”

It does not seem to occur to these wise people that the right to talk is itself one of the chief rights in America, and the way to reach all the others.  To talk is to make a beginning, at any rate.  To catch people with your ideas is more than to contrive a rat-trap; and Isotta Nogarola, carving thirty-six empty heads, was not working in so practical a fashion as Mary Livermore when she instructs thirty-six hundred full ones.