to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had
been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to
throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of
lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron
hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat,
organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at
the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and
called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the
people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as
they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and
"proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters
referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the
General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons.
He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult
had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months,
using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local
news.

In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not
come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a
newspaper should stand for "principles." The _Statesman_ was started
during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the
General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy
a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could
understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the
town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never
exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General
saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and
expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often
ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental
ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions,
for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county
institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm
for the future of the noble calling of journalism.

Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article
referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the
printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and
although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and