“Yes, the Political Science Quarterly and the Journal of the Anthropological Institute.”  Sharlee smiled tolerantly, and immediately resumed:  “When you sit down at the office to write an article, whom do you think you are writing for?  A company of scientists?  An institute of gray-bearded scholars?  An academy of fossilized old doctors of laws?  There are not a dozen people of that sort who read the Post.  Has it never occurred to you to call up before your mind’s eye the people you actually are writing for?  You can see them any day as you walk along the street.  Go into a street car at six o’clock any night and look around at the faces.  There is your public, the readers of the Post—­shop-clerks, stenographers, factory-hands, office-men, plumbers, teamsters, drummers, milliners.  Look at them.  Have you anything to say to interest them?  Think.  If they were to file in here now and ask you to make a few remarks, could you, for the life of you, say one single thing that would interest them?”

“I do not pretend, or aspire,” said Mr. Queed, “to dispense frothy nothings tricked out to beguile the tired brick-layer.  My duty is to give forth valuable information and ripened judgment couched in language—­”

“No, your duty is to get yourself read; if you fail there you fail everywhere.  Is it possible that you don’t begin to grasp that point yet?  I fancied that your mind was quicker.  You appear to think that the duty of a newspaper is to back people up against a wall and ram helpful statistics into them with a force-pump.  You are grotesquely mistaken.  Your ideal newspaper would not keep a dozen readers in this city:  that is to say, it would be a complete failure while it lasted and would bankrupt Mr. Morgan in six months.  A dead newspaper is a useless one, the world over.  At the same time, every living and good newspaper is a little better, spreads a little more sweetness and light, gives out a little more valuable information, ripened judgment, et cetera, than the vast majority of its readers want or will absorb.  The Post is that sort of newspaper.  It is constantly tugging its readers a little higher than they—­I mean the majority, and not the cultured few—­are willing to go.  But the Post always recognizes that its first duty is to get itself read:  if it does not succeed in that, it lacks the principle of life and dies.  Perhaps the tired bricklayer you speak of, the middle-class, commonplace, average people who make up nearly all of the world, ought to be interested in John Stuart Mill’s attitude toward the single-tax.  But the fact is that they aren’t.  The Post wisely deals with the condition, and not a theory:  it means to get itself read.  It is your first duty, as a writer for it, to get yourself read.  If you fail to get yourself read, you are worse than useless to the Post.  Well, you have completely failed to do this, and that is why the Post is discharging you.  Come, free yourself from exaggerated notions about your own importance and look at this simple point with the calm detachment of a scientist.  The Post can save money, while preserving just the same effect, by discharging you and printing every morning a half-column from the Encyclopedia Britannica.”