ing for? A company of scientists? An institute of
gray-bearded scholars? An academy of fossilized old doctors of laws?
There are not a dozen people of that sort who read the _Post_. Has it
never occurred to you to call up before your mind's eye the people you
actually are writing for? You can see them any day as you walk along the
street. Go into a street car at six o'clock any night and look
around at the faces. There is your public, the readers of the
_Post_--shop-clerks, stenographers, factory-hands, office-men, plumbers,
teamsters, drummers, milliners. Look at them. Have you anything to say
to interest them? Think. If they were to file in here now and ask you to
make a few remarks, could you, for the life of you, say one single thing
that would interest them?"

"I do not pretend, or aspire," said Mr. Queed, "to dispense frothy
nothings tricked out to beguile the tired brick-layer. My duty is to
give forth valuable information and ripened judgment couched in
language--"

"No, your duty is to get yourself read; if you fail there you fail
everywhere. Is it possible that you don't begin to grasp that point yet?
I fancied that your mind was quicker. You appear to think that the duty
of a newspaper is to back people up against a wall and ram helpful
statistics into them with a force-pump. You are grotesquely mistaken.
Your ideal newspaper would not keep a dozen readers in this city: that
is to say, it would be a complete failure while it lasted and would
bankrupt Mr. Morgan in six months. A dead newspaper is a useless one,
the world over. At the same time, every living and good newspaper is a
little better, spreads a little more sweetness and light, gives out a
little more valuable information, ripened judgment, et cetera, than the
vast majority of its readers want or will absorb. The _Post_ is that
sort of newspaper. It is constantly tugging its readers a little higher
than they--I mean the majority, and not the cultured few--are willing to
go. But the _Post_ always recognizes that its first duty is to get
itself read: if it does not succeed in that, it lacks the principle of
life and dies. Perhaps the tired bricklayer you speak of, the
middle-class, commonplace, average people who make up nearly all of the
world, ought to be interested in John Stuart Mill's attitude toward the
single-tax. But the fact is that they aren't. The _Post_ wisely deals
with the condition, and not a theory: it means to get itself read. It is