end of the great common people and gotten away with
it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a
synthetic genius."

"There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious--two
things that make up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his
genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of
these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds
on--vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the
salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet
you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill
him, and never guessing the real answer."

"Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.

"Wait, I'm coming to that. The press is always prating about the power
of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to
destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet
every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's
true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a
man by printing favourable things about him. By that same token they
imagine they can tear him down by printing unfavourable things about
him. They think they can, but they can't. Let them get together in a
campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody
to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a
psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their
wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. The reactions of printer's
ink are stronger somehow than its original actions--its chemical
processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many
a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It
wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact
that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so
bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together,
and what's the result? Sympathy for him--that's what. Calling
'Unclean, unclean!' after a leper never yet made people shun him. It
only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the
facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's
true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.

"But the newspapers have one weapon they've never yet used; at least
as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've
got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet