usted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed
pages of the book of the chronicles of the Republic. As for the Police
Headquarters man, he too alone knows both police and crime, and no
investigation surprises him by its revelations. If a man, for a
season, has had the work of one of these posts, he comes to feel that
he writes for an ignorant world, and if he have the precious gift of
youth, looks on himself as favored of mortals early, seeing the events
of which others hear, daily close to the center of affairs, knowing
men as they are and storing confidence against the day of revelation.

Men like these are the very heart's core of a newspaper. Their posts
train them. So do the key posts of a newspaper, its guiding and
directing editors and those who do the thinking for thinking men by
the hundred thousand in editorial, criticism, and article. It is for
this order of work on a newspaper that a school of journalism trains.
It is to these posts that, if its men are properly trained, its
graduates rapidly ascend, after a brief apprenticeship in the
city-room and a round in the routine work of a paper. Dull men,
however educated, will never pass these grades, and not passing they
will drop out. A school should sift such out; but so far, in all our
professional training, it is only the best medical schools which are
inflexible in dealing with mediocrity. Most teachers know better, but
let the shifty and dull pass by. The newspaper itself has to be
inexorable, and no well-organized office helps twice the man who is
dull once; but he and his kind come often enough to mar the record.

Journalism, like other professions, has its body of special tasks and
training, but, as in other callings, clear comprehension of this body
of needs will develop in instruction slowly. The case system in law
and the laboratory method in medicine came after some generations or
centuries of professional work and are only a generation old. Any one
who has sought to know the development of these two methods sees that
much in our schools of journalism is where law and medical schools
were sixty years ago. We are still floundering and have not yet solved
the problem of giving background, concision, accuracy, and interest to
the report, of really editing copy and not merely condensing and
heading it, of recognizing and developing the editorial and critical
mind, and most of all, of shutting out early the shallow, the
wrong-headed, the self-se