Judge — May 13, 1922 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

———— “Caution has grown a large knob on the editorial head.” EDITORIAL By Witiiam ALLEN WHITE THOUGHTS ON OUR BELOVED PRESIDENT HE editor of the leading daily paper in Marion, Ohio, who is at the moment at Washington, D. C., by way of being the Most Powerful Sovereign on Earth, has, as editor of the Marion Star (which, after all, is his chief means of livelihood), a wholesome respect for two groups in Marion: his leading advertisers, who dominate the Chamber of Commerce, and the ieaders of the City Fed- eration of Labor. A constant reader of the Marion Star never found its esteemed editor going out of his way to offend either group. For one controls his principal source of revenue, and the other represents the largest minority of his sub- scribers. Without subscribers a paper has no adver- tisers. Without advertisers an editor has no money for his pay roll. Hence ccution has grown a large knob on the average editorial head. An editor usually can hang his cane on it. Politeness and courtesy are major edi- torial virtues. In Marion, Ohio, the editor of the Star is the politest man in town. And so all this tall talk of the reporters about the editor of the Marion Star kicking the daylights out of the Civil Service in Washington lacks conviction. Harding never will kick the daylights out of anything. If the daylights require removal, the extractior will be done pleasantly, quietly, and “in a very gen | manly w’y.” To kick the daylights out of the Civil Service would be Rooseveltian, Clevelandesque perhaps, even in a high and mighty mood, Wilsonian. But with Harding or McKinley?—it would be like sending for the President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to chaperon a bullfight. The editor of the Marion Star has made too signal a success as a publisher of a daily in a small town to expect him to change the habits of a lifetime while on special assignment in the White House. We should advise any journeyman prophet who desired to read the future of the nation for the next three years to get the files of the Marion Star for the last twenty years and peruse them intelligently; then take out his prophet’s license and gaze into his crystal ball and tell the world about it. But nowhere will he find Editor Harding trifling with the main chance. And in so far as the Civil Service repre- sents a rather large segment of the main chance, it is as safe in the White House as in the office of the Boston Transcript! “UPON WHAT MEAT” ROBABLY there is something in Senator Norris's P charge that Chief Justice Taft is “eatin’ rich” at the tables of the great and powerful. The friends of the Chief Justice, however, parry the Nebraska Senator by publishing the day's routine of the judge, which looks like the program of an esthete. And there the matter is deadlocked. The trouble is, we are allowing our judges too much liberty. Steps should be Taken; it was a mistake to let the Shepherd-Towner bill go through Congress without an amendment providing for dissemination of proper knowledge among the people about the care and feeding