He stops people for four years.  Other people stop him for four years.  Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into real life and begins to do things.

This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical American President.  Merely reading the Constitution or the lives of the Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, “What is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?” What is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other people’s duties—­what is there that is going to prevent him, with his school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from being a teachery or preachery person—­a kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to Business?

News.

The one really important and imperative thing to the people of this country to-day is News.  In spite of newspapers, authors, College presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods, and Trusts, the people are bound to get this news, and any man who is so placed by his prominence that he can scoop up the news of a country, hammer its news together into events the papers will report, express news in the laws, build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws, any man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes news, forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things, who takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news into lawyers and into legislatures, pries some of it even into newspapers, can have, the ordinary American says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he likes.

The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection important people have—­that nearly everybody has (except ordinary people) to news—­especially editors and publishers.

It is an old story.  Every one must have noticed it.  One set of people in this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and saying, “Hush, Hush!” Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, “Shoo! shoo!  SHSH!  SHSH!”

Then I realize I live in an editor’s world.  I am expected to be in the world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.

Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me.

I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of climbing up to News.

I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic curves of truth on them the editors have laid out for me and for all of us.  Then I looked at the world and asked myself, “Who are the men in this world, if any, who are able to walk on the Grass, who cut across the little park paths when they like?”