sed the chairman of directors, as it
was somewhat outspoken in favour of municipal trams, and the chairman
was a shareholder in the existing company. Another director wanted to
see more news from the colliery districts than the paper usually
contained, and a third fancied that the City news was not full enough.
Yet another, a wealthy hosiery manufacturer, who was wont to boast
himself a "self-made man," pointed out that they didn't like leaders to
be humorous, and he was open to bet as the heditor was wrong in saying
"politics was tabu," when everybody knoo as 'ow the word was "tabooed."
He'd looked it hup in the dictionary 'imself. Politics and
newspaper-editorship bring us strange bedfellows.

The simple truth was that Henry, all too soon, had learned what an
editor's responsibility meant. It meant supporting the political
programme of the party which the paper represented, temporising with
selfish interests, humouring ignorance when it wore diamond rings,
toiling for others to take the credit, and blundering for oneself to
bear the blame.

Many of these worries would have been absent from the editorship of a
really first-class newspaper; but first-class journals are seldom edited
by young men of twenty-two or thereby. Henry had no financial control--a
good thing for him, perhaps--and the manager had won the confidence of
the directors through procuring dividends by cutting down expenses. He
saved sixpence a week by insisting on the caretaker, who made tea for
the staff every evening, buying in a less quantity of milk. He pointed
out to the poor woman that she was unduly severe on scrubbing-brushes,
and after refusing to sign a bill for a sixpenny ball of string
required in the packing department, on the plea that "there was a deal
of waste going on," he went out to dine with Sir Henry Field, the
chairman of directors, to the tune of a guinea a head "for the prestige
of the paper." He had even stopped the _Spectator_ and the _Saturday
Review_, which had been bought for the editor in the past, urging that
it was dangerous to read them, as that might interfere with the editor's
originality in his leaders. Besides, it saved a shilling a week, and
really one didn't know what journalistic competition was coming to.

Yet Henry had "succeeded," though he had not "arrived." Best evidence of
his success was the jealousy which he created among the older members of
the staff, and the contempt in which his name was held in the