d but Esteemed Contemporary

No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our
town--generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and
doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and
though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are
so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the
profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a
deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question,
even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the
opposing side.

Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good
many times--every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls
in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office--that
whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at
six o'clock, the General swings the _Statesman_ into line against it. If
he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years;
and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes
which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the
town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew
that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some
way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could
see that justification in the _Statesman_'s position. To us it seemed
merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to
appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us
more tolerant of his shortcomings.

Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the
_Statesman_ for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was
master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A.
Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and
controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could
never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies,
he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a
generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his
sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any
Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention
with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who
had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he
started, gave h