ent of public affairs. We look upon
newspapers as having a sort of composite temperament, formed from the
temperaments of all the different men employed on them; but, as a matter
of fact, they each express the disposition and reflect the temperament
of one controlling spirit, which all the other dispositions and
temperaments yield to. This is so much the case that it is hard to
efface the influence of a strong mind from the journal it has shaped,
even when it is no longer actively present in it. A good many years
before the time of the Northwick defalcation, the _Events_ had been in
the management of a journalist, once well-known in Boston, a certain
Bartley Hubbard, who had risen from the ranks of the reporters, and who
had thoroughly reporterized it in the worst sense. After he left it, the
owner tried several devices for elevating and reforming it, but failed,
partly because he was himself a man of no ideals but those of the
counting-room, and largely because the paper could not recover from the
strong slant given it without self-destruction. So the _Events_
continued what Bartley Hubbard had made it, and what the readers he had
called about it liked it to be: a journal without principles and without
convictions, but with interests only; a map of busy life, indeed, but
glaringly colored, with crude endeavors at picturesqueness, and with no
more truth to life than those railroad maps where the important centres
converge upon the broad black level of the line advertised, and leave
rival roads wriggling faintly about in uninhabited solitudes. In
Hubbard's time the _Abstract_, then the _Chronicle-Abstract_, was in
charge of the editor who had been his first friend on the Boston press,
and whom he finally quarreled with on a point which this friend
considered dishonorable to Hubbard. Ricker had not since left the paper,
and though he was called a crank by some of the more progressive and
reckless of the young men, he clung to his ideal of a conscience in
journalism; he gave the Abstract a fixed character and it could no more
have changed than the _Events_, without self-destruction. The men under
him were not so many as Caesar's soldiers, and that, perhaps, was the
reason why he knew not only their names but their qualities. When
Maxwell came with the fact of the defalcation which the detectives had
entrusted to him for provisional use, and asked to be assigned to the
business of working it up, Kicker consented, but he conse