His opinion of the editorial output in general was unflattering.  It seemed to him bound by formalism and incredibly blind to the immense and vivid interest of the news whereby it was surrounded, as if a man, set down in a meadow full of deep and clear springs, should elect to drink from a shallow, torpid, and muddy trickle.  Legislation, taxes, transportation problems, the Greatness of Our City, our National Duty (whatever it might be at the time—­and according to opinion), the drink question, the race problem, labor and capital; these were the reiterated topics, dealt with informatively often, sometimes wittily, seldom impartially.  But, at best, this was but the creaking mechanism of the artificial structure of society, and it was varied only by an occasional literary or artistic sally, or a preachment in the terms of a convinced moralization upon the unvarying text that the wages of sin is death.  Why not a touch of humanism, now and again, thought Banneker, following the inevitable parallels in paper after paper; a ray of light striking through into the life-texture beneath?

By way of experiment he watched the tide of readers, flowing through the newspaper room of the Public Library, to ascertain what they read.  Not one in thirty paid any attention to the editorial pages.  Essaying farther afield, he attended church on several occasions.  His suspicions were confirmed; from the pulpit he heard, addressed to scanty congregations, the same carefully phrased, strictly correct comments, now dealing, however, with the mechanism of another world.  The chief point of difference was that the newspaper editorials were, on the whole, more felicitously worded and more compactly thought out.  Essentially, however, the two ran parallel.

Banneker wondered whether the editorial rostrum, too, was fated to deliver its would-be authoritative message to an audience which threatened to dwindle to the vanishing point.  Who read those carefully wrought columns in The Ledger?  Pot-bellied chair-warmers in clubs; hastening business men appreciative of the daily assurance that stability is the primal and final blessing, discontent the cardinal sin, the extant system perfect and holy, and any change a wile of the forces of destruction—­as if the human race had evoluted by the power of standing still!  For the man in the street they held no message.  No; nor for the woman in the home.  Banneker thought of young Smith of the yacht and the coming millions, with a newspaper waiting to drop into his hands.  He wished he could have that newspaper—­any newspaper, for a year.  He’d make the man in the street sit up and read his editorials.  Yes, and the woman in the home.  Why not the boy and the girl in school, also?  Any writer, really master of his pen, ought to be able to make even a problem in algebra editorially interesting!