The editor of one of our big modern newspapers gave it to me as his opinion that the art of producing a newspaper is as much in its infancy as is the science of electricity.  “The yellow journal,” said he, “is an evolution, just as trusts in their deeper significance are an evolution.  We have had the didactic editor; he did his work and has passed away.  We are now having the editor who deals with facts—­’cold facts,’ as Dickens would say—­but, in his turn, he is only a part of the general evolution.  There is not an editor in this country, no matter what his own views may be as to his own paper, who does not know, and in his heart admit, that the ideal paper is yet to be produced.”

Excellent and even wonderful as the public press of to-day is, the above is the opinion held by the great mass of men; and it is the correct opinion.  I mean what I say when I use the words “excellent and wonderful” as applied to newspapers.  To me the newspaper is a daily astonishment.  What we are all in search of is fresh and vital thought and suggestion; and no one can acquire the art of newspaper reading without getting, each day, one or many new points of view on the world and its great human currents.

Each one of our metropolitan papers is at enormous outlay to get strong, capable men—­young men with new minds and old men with wise minds.  It is simply out of the question for these men, working together, to bring forth a product that does not have in it some remarkable thing—­some new point of view, some fact which your most careful research has not disclosed to you.

I remember an instance in my own experience.  There was a subject to which I had given some years of off-and-on study.  I felt that at least the facts had been accumulated.  All that remained was to deduce the truth from these facts.  But an editorial on this subject in a notable daily paper brought out a salient fact which none of the books had mentioned, and yet which, when one’s attention was called to it, was so apparent that it really ought to have suggested itself.  Yet all the speeches of the specialists on this subject, and all of the volumes, had failed to note it.

Some vigorous young mind on that paper had discovered it in studying the elementary factors of the problem itself.  But this is digression.  I am simply calling your attention to the fact that there are opportunities for you to be greater in the world of journalism than Greeley, or Raymond, or Bennett, or Bowles, or Dana, or any of the extraordinary men that have illumined the whole science of journalism by their intellect, accomplishments, and character.

Electricity is a mysterious force which excites not only all the speculation but all the mysticism in man.  I contemplate its manifestations—­equally deadly and vital—­with feelings of wonder and awe.  I always search for an electrician and listen to his stories of the mysterious power with which he deals.  One of the greatest of them said to me last year: