itution or the lives of the
Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of
the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, "What
is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What
is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness
dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other
people's duties--what is there that is going to prevent him, with his
school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from
being a teachery or preachery person--a kind of Schoolmaster or Official
Clergyman to Business?

News.

The one really important and imperative thing to the people of this
country to-day is News. In spite of newspapers, authors, College
presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods, and
Trusts, the people are bound to get this news, and any man who is so
placed by his prominence that he can scoop up the news of a country,
hammer its news together into events the papers will report, express
news in the laws, build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws,
any man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes news,
forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things, who
takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news into lawyers and into
legislatures, pries some of it even into newspapers, can have, the
ordinary American says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he
likes.

The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection
important people have--that nearly everybody has (except ordinary
people) to news--especially editors and publishers.

It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One set of people in
this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the
housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and
saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I
hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo!
shoo! SHSH! SHSH!"

Then I realize I live in an editor's world. I am expected to be in the
world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.

Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me.

I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of
climbing up to News.

I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic
curves of truth on them the editors have laid out