Children cried for them, and laughed to exhaustion over them.  Not less did the mentally exhausted business man writhe abdominally over their appeal.  Spread across the top of three pages they wrung the profitable belly-laugh from growing thousands of new readers.  If Banneker sometimes had misgivings that the educational influence of The Patriot was not notably improved by all this instigation of crime and immorality made subject for mirth in the mind of developing youth, he stifled them in the thought of increased reading public for his own columns.  Furthermore, it was not his newspaper, anyway.

But the editorial page was still peculiarly his own, and with that clarity of view which he never permitted personal considerations to prejudice, Banneker perceived that it was falling below pitch.  Or, rather, that, while it remained static, the rest of the paper, under the stimulus of Severance, Capron, Sheffer, and, in the background but increasingly though subtly assertive, Marrineal, had raised its level of excitation.  Change his editorials he would not.  Nor was there need; the response to them was too widespread and fervent, their following too blindly fanatic, the opposition roused by them too furious to permit of any doubt as to their effectiveness.  But that portion of the page not taken up by his writings and the cartoon (which was often based upon an idea supplied by him), was susceptible of alteration, of keying-up.  Casting about him for the popular note, the circus appeal, he started a “signed-article” department of editorial contributions to which he invited any and all persons of prominence in whatever line.  The lure of that universal egotism which loves to see itself in the public eye secured a surprising number of names.  Propagandists were quick to appreciate the opportunity of The Patriot’s wide circulation for furthering their designs, selfish or altruistic.  To such desirables as could not be caught by other lures, Banneker offered generous payment.

It was on this latter basis that he secured a prize, in the person of the Reverend George Bland, ex-revivalist, ex-author of pious stories for the young, skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men’s souls are so easily lulled into self-satisfaction.  The Good, the True, the Beautiful; these were his texts, but the real god of his worship was Success.  This, under the guise of Duty ("man’s God-inspired ambition to be true to his best possibilities"), he preached day in and day out through his “Daily Help” in The Patriot:  Be guided by me and you will be good:  Be good and you will be prosperous:  Be prosperous and you will be happy.  On an adjoining page there were other and far more specific instructions as to how to be prosperous and happy, by backing Speedfoot at 10 to 1 in the first race, or Flashaway at 5 to 2 in the third.  Sometimes the Reverend Bland