they let it lie
in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any
human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time
it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. And yet
they can't see it--or won't see that it's there, all forged and ready
to their hands."

"And that weapon is what?" asked Drayton.

"Silence. Absolute, utter silence. Silence is the loudest thing in the
world. It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest.
What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness?
The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the
trick--silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums
and addles their brains."

"Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should
be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to
destroy him is to wall him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of
silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in
silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of
them, only to do one little thing--just quit printing his name."

"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton.
"Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is
to-day in this country."

"That's the same foolish argument that the average newspaper man would
make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the
newspapers make news of him--and for no other reason. Let them quit,
and he isn't news any more--he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all,
he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease
to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news--once
you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every
conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on
notoriety--newspaper notoriety. Notoriety is as essential to the
object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of
those who read about it. And there's just one place where you can get
wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day--out of the jaws of a printing
press.

"We call baseball our national pastime--granted! But let the
newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit
printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and
the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid.
You remember those deluded ladies who almost did the cause of suffrage