influential newspaper, is to sacrifice the grander opportunity and
responsibility for the unsatisfying fame of official distinction. It is
the mission of the newspaper to create Presidents and other rulers; to
judge them when in power; to sustain them when they have been faithful
and efficient in the discharge of public duties, and to defeat them when
they are forgetful of the public welfare. In the discharge of these
important duties the newspaper must, above all, be free from the
suspicion of seeking individual advantage and it can be so only by
accepting its trust as highest of all and more enduring than all. Great
editors have been presumably honored by conferring upon them high
official positions in recognition of party services, but no editor in
the entire history of American journalism who has made his newspaper
secondary to political ambition, has written any other record than
failure as both editor and statesman.

My brethren of the press need not be reminded of the often painful
duties which come to the fearless editor. They must ever remember that
"faithful are the wounds of a friend," and no class of teachers so
well-known that:--

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

Few, very few indeed, outside of the editorial sanctum ever learn how
the surges of ambition, in all its varied and fantastic phases from the
noblest to the meanest, assail and often vex journalistic duties. The
public know not of the many gifted men who must thus at times be saved
from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents
a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw.
Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over
mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions
the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as
public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists,
as with others, in awarding public honors; but with all its exactions
and responsibilities, which are ever magnified by the greater
opportunities for usefulness, there is no calling that brings richer
compensation for fidelity to duty. The consciousness that each day the
editor whose readers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, may greatly
aid in making the world better than it was in the passing yesterday, is
a constant inspiration to the best efforts, and it is especially
gratifying that even