ndustrial and sociological questions are the
profoundest of all. The world has been at work on these since men
arranged themselves into organized society. But the incredibly swift
evolution of modern business itself seems to be hastening the time
when some satisfactory solution of these master problems must at least
be begun.

So that, if you really have the material of a statesman in you--the
stuff that thinks out the answer to great questions--there is a field
before you compared with which the opportunities of Hamilton and
Washington and Jefferson almost seem small, leviathan as those
opportunities were and masterfully as those great men improved them.

The editor of one of our big modern newspapers gave it to me as his
opinion that the art of producing a newspaper is as much in its
infancy as is the science of electricity. "The yellow journal," said
he, "is an evolution, just as trusts in their deeper significance are
an evolution. We have had the didactic editor; he did his work and has
passed away. We are now having the editor who deals with facts--'cold
facts,' as Dickens would say--but, in his turn, he is only a part of
the general evolution. There is not an editor in this country, no
matter what his own views may be as to his own paper, who does not
know, and in his heart admit, that the ideal paper is yet to be
produced."

Excellent and even wonderful as the public press of to-day is, the
above is the opinion held by the great mass of men; and it is the
correct opinion. I mean what I say when I use the words "excellent and
wonderful" as applied to newspapers. To me the newspaper is a daily
astonishment. What we are all in search of is fresh and vital thought
and suggestion; and no one can acquire the _art_ of newspaper reading
without getting, each day, one or many new points of view on the world
and its great human currents.

Each one of our metropolitan papers is at enormous outlay to get
strong, capable men--young men with new minds and old men with wise
minds. It is simply out of the question for these men, working
together, to bring forth a product that does not have in it some
remarkable thing--some new point of view, some fact which your most
careful research has not disclosed to you.

I remember an instance in my own experience. There was a subject to
which I had given some years of off-and-on study. I felt that at least
the facts had been accumulated. All that remained was to deduce the
truth f