bour--that bugbear of Barnes'--if there is any hope
for the British Constitution, which probably there is not, I believe it
lies there. It is a very small one, at the best. Anyhow, it certainly did
not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of
incompetents in an incompetent House.

It was in discussing this that I discovered that Hobart couldn't discuss.
He could talk; he could assert, produce opinions and information, but he
couldn't meet or answer arguments. And he was cautious, afraid of
committing himself, afraid, I fancied, of exposing gulfs in his equipment
of information, for, like other journalists of his type, his habit was to
write about things of which he knew little. Old Pinkerton remarked once,
at a dinner to American newspaper men, that his own idea of a good
journalist was a man who could sit down at any moment and write a column
on any subject. The American newspaper men cheered this; it was their
idea of a good journalist too. It is an amusing game, and one encouraged
by the Anti-Potterite League, to waylay leader-writers and tackle them
about their leaders, turn them inside out and show how empty they are.
I've written that sort of leader myself, of course, but not for the
_Fact_; we don't allow it. There, the man who writes is the man who
knows, and till some one knows no one writes. That is why some people
call us dry, heavy, lacking in ideas, and say we are like a Blue Book, or
a paper read to the British Association. We are proud of that
reputation. The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we
are out for facts.

Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person. All he had was a _flair_
for the popular point of view. That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got
hold of him. He was a true Potterite. Possibly I always saw him at his
least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn't like me and knew
I didn't like him. Even then there had already been one or two rather
acrimonious disputes between my paper and his on points of fact. The
_Daily Haste_ hated being pinned down to and quarrelled with about facts;
facts didn't seem to the Pinkerton press things worth quarrelling over,
like policy, principles, or prejudices. The story goes that when any one
told old Pinkerton he was wrong about something, he would point to his
vast circulation, using it as an argument that he couldn't be mistaken.
If you still pressed and proved your point, he would again refer to his