instant information.  It is easy enough when the news is developed, and everybody is discussing it, for the editor to fall in; but the success of the news printed depends upon a pre-apprehension of all this.  Some papers, which nevertheless print all the news, are always a day behind, do not appreciate the popular drift till it has gone to something else, and err as much by clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not taking it up before it was fairly born.  The public craves eagerly for only one thing at a time, and soon wearies of that; and it is to the newspaper’s profit to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse; to throw itself into it as if life depended on it, and for the hour to flood the popular curiosity with it as an engine deluges a fire.

Scarcely less important than promptly seizing and printing the news is the attractive arrangement of it, its effective presentation to the eye.  Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence, identically the same despatches:  the one will be called bright, attractive, “newsy”; the other, dull and stupid.

We have said nothing yet about that, which, to most people, is the most important aspect of the newspaper,—­the editor’s responsibility to the public for its contents.  It is sufficient briefly to say here, that it is exactly the responsibility of every other person in society,—­the full responsibility of his opportunity.  He has voluntarily taken a position in which he can do a great deal of good or a great deal of evil, and he, should be held and judged by his opportunity:  it is greater than that of the preacher, the teacher, the congressman, the physician.  He occupies the loftiest pulpit; he is in his teacher’s desk seven days in the week; his voice can be heard farther than that of the most lusty fog-horn politician; and often, I am sorry to say, his columns outshine the shelves of the druggist in display of proprietary medicines.  Nothing else ever invented has the public attention as the newspaper has, or is an influence so constant and universal.  It is this large opportunity that has given the impression that the newspaper is a public rather than a private enterprise.

It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the borderland between literature and common sense.  Literature it certainly is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must have something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the other, or it will fail to please.  The model editor, I believe, has yet to appear.  Notwithstanding the traditional reputation of certain editors in the past, they could not be called great editors by our standards; for the elements of modern journalism did not exist in their time.  The old newspaper was a broadside of stale news, with a moral essay attached.