If the excellence of a newspaper is not always measured by its profitableness, it is generally true that, if it does not pay its owner, it is valueless to the public.  Not all newspapers which make money are good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable people, and to the prejudice, ignorance, and passion of the lowest class; but, as a rule, the successful journal pecuniarily is the best journal.  The reasons for this are on the surface.  The impecunious newspaper cannot give its readers promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news, and, still worse, it cannot be independent.  The political journal that relies for support upon drippings of party favor or patronage, the general newspaper that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate stock reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious support from puffing doubtful enterprises, the literary paper that depends upon the approval of publishers, are poor affairs, and, in the long run or short run, come to grief.  Some newspapers do succeed by sensationalism, as some preachers do; by a kind of quackery, as some doctors do; by trimming and shifting to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians do; by becoming the paid advocate of a personal ambition or a corporate enterprise, as some lawyers do:  but the newspaper only becomes a real power when it is able, on the basis of pecuniary independence, to free itself from all such entanglements.  An editor who stands with hat in hand has the respect accorded to any other beggar.

The recognition of the fact that the newspaper is a private and purely business enterprise will help to define the mutual relations of the editor and the public.  His claim upon the public is exactly that of any manufacturer or dealer.  It is that of the man who makes cloth, or the grocer who opens a shop—­neither has a right to complain if the public does not buy of him.  If the buyer does not like a cloth half shoddy, or coffee half-chicory, he will go elsewhere.  If the subscriber does not like one newspaper, he takes another, or none.  The appeal for newspaper support on the ground that such a journal ought to be sustained by an enlightened community, or on any other ground than that it is a good article that people want,—­or would want if they knew its value,—­is purely childish in this age of the world.  If any person wants to start a periodical devoted to decorated teapots, with the noble view of inducing the people to live up to his idea of a teapot, very good; but he has no right to complain if he fails.

On the other hand, the public has no rights in the newspaper except what it pays for; even the “old subscriber” has none, except to drop the paper if it ceases to please him.  The notion that the subscriber has a right to interfere in the conduct of the paper, or the reader to direct its opinions, is based on a misconception of what the newspaper is.  The claim of the public to have its communications