You may print your editions in red ink, with job type, with headlines a foot high if you like, without other offenses than to exaggerate the importance of your announcement. Typographical eccentricity merely attracts attention. It serves the same purpose as does the orator's violent gesture or the messenger's breathless announcement. It excites curiosity, arouses in

terest.

Now, there is such a thing as harmless exaggeration. It enters largely into our private life. Our dreams of wealth, of success, of happiness are usually far beyond the fulfillment. We exaggerate our prospects, ambitions and promises to ourselves. But this form of exaggeration is most beneficial for it is a spur to am'bition and a prod to effort.

The editor is tempted to exaggeration because a little exaggeration makes it a little more interesting. He sees that the exaggerated novel sells while the novel true to life is unnoticed; that the actor who gesticulates and shouts has the loudest applause; that the painter who outdoes nature outsells the artist who is true to fact. Indeed, some philosopher has said that an easy road to success lies through exaggeration. The man who exaggerates his own importance attracts more attention than the modest man. The merchant who exaggerates his wares sells more than the man who does not. Sensational clergymen fill churches while prosy ones preach to empty benches. It was Sidney Smith who remarked: "It is not the first man who says a thing who deserves credit for it, but he who says it so

long and so loud that at last he persuades the world that it is true." Macaulay remarked: "The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature, and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of exaggeration, of fictitious narrative, is judiciously employed."

But the editor must use exaggeration with great discretion, must not pervert the truth. Gross exaggeration becomes downright lying.

Man's language cunningly adapts itself to man's thoughts. Sixty years ago writers were under the influence of what may be described as a literary age that so-called golden age of the intellect that marked the early years of Victoria's reign. It was a period of intellectual uplift. People were thinking of literature and talking of literature. Men hurried through their suppers to read to the family circle the stories of Dickens and Hawthorne and Walter Scott. The literary lecture was popular and people went to church for the literary pleasure the sermon afforded. The newspaper editors were writing literature and were urging their staffs to renewed literary effort. The magazines were conspicuous for literary excellence. The theaters were instructive. The writers of poetry and prose sought a nicety of literary expression, a daintiness of diction, a legato of language. Courses of study favored instruction in literature and literary topics, in language and history, in science and philosophy.

And now, if you please, mark the contrast. We are living in a business age. War has blunted our sensibili

ties, has made us callous, has coarsened civilization. We care little for so-called polite literature. We want the rugged kind. The family circle does not meet for literary exercises. We are thinking of commercialism, of money making, of gigantic locomotives, of immense bridges and tunnels, of aqueducts a hundred and thirty miles long, of skyscraping buildings, flying machines, telephones, typewriting machines, typesetting machines, electric devices. We are thinking of them until we are thinking of little else.

It is the age of the machine. Mechanical processes are doing the work that formerly demanded mental skill. The village blacksmith no longer commands admiration by his picturesque and intelligent forging of the nail and shoe he buys them ready made by machinery. The learned shoemaker no longer artfully fashions my lady's dainty slipper-the shoe machine punches it out. We bawl letters and dinner invitations through that mechanical device, the telephone, instead of writing them in the old fashioned courtly way. Time was when men put brains into what they did with their hands; but to-day, machines rather than brains are doing the work of the world.

Our language and our literature cannot escape the influence. Instead of the sweetly gliding words and sentences of the men who translated the Bible, the deliberation of Thackeray, the ornate embellishments of Washington Irving instead of the soft speaking poetry of 1850 and the flossy velvet prose of 1860 our present-day writers are using whirlwind sentences and

words in staccato that bite and scratch and explode. We are changing our diction from the niceties of literary expression to a blunter and a coarser form of expression.

There can be no harm in it, however. The net result is to improve the language. It is taking on the additional strength and agility and brevity that come of our industrial activity. The very magnitude of our undertakings, the very dimensions of our ambitions inspire to greatness of thought and forcefulness of speech. The red blood of war is nourishing the vitals of our language.

CHAPTER IV

THE FASCINATION OF WRITING FOR THE
EDITORIAL PAGE

OUR young man who has just entered journalism begins soon to look longingly toward the editorial page. He wants to become an editorial writer. He longs to get into the world's controversies, to thump Presidents, to crush cabinets, to pulverize politicians, to rebuke rulers, to sandbag ignorance, sin and superstition whenever they raise their swollen heads. His immature notion of editorial writing is to smash into somebody or something. He has a lot to learn.

The editorial page is the most important part of the newspaper. It gives the sheet its greatest distinction, its widest influence, its chief reputation gives the editor his proudest satisfaction. It is here that the editor shows to the public the true measure of his ability and inspires the confidence and the respect of his community, if at all.

The editorial article is a little essay on a current topic. You may glorify the topic by giving it conspicuous importance in the strongest language at command, or you may minimize it by inane flabby comments on its weakest features and by ignoring its essentials.