THE AMATEUR EDITOR.
THE country appears to be overrun at present with amateur
editors. When a man learns by sad experience that
he hasn't sufficient sense to successfully steer a blind mule
through a cotton patch, where the rows are a rod apart,
he exchanges his double-shovel plot for the editorial tripod
and begins "moulding public opinion" and industriously
exchanging advertising acreage for something to
eat. When Will Carleton's old farmer discovered that
his son Jim was good for nothing else on God's earth he
concluded to "be makin' an editor outen o' him." That
practice prevails throughout the country to a very
considerable extent to-day—the sanctum divides with the
pulpit and the stage those incompetents who aspire to
mount above the plow, yet lack the necessary brains to
succeed in business, in medicine or at the bar. When a
man fails at everything else he is apt to be seized with
a yearning ambition to become an editor. He gets
trusted for a shirt-tail full o' pied type, a pre-Raphaelite
press, lays in a job-lot of editorial "we's" and a sawdust
cuspidore, girds up his loins and begins to commence.
His first task is to reform the currency system and
instruct the universe in the esoteric science of economics.
He may not be able to successfully float a butcher's bill,
but he writes of finance with all the assurance of Alexander
Hamilton. He may not know whether Adam Smith or
Tommy Watson wrote the "Wealth of Nations"; but he
doesn't hesitate to take issue with every economist from
Quesnay to Walter—to utilize his paste-pot for arc
light and play at Liberty Enlightening the World. These
amateur editors are the curse of the country. They
Guldensuppe John Stuart Mill and play Leutgert to Lindley
Murray. It is some consolation, however, to reflect that
they seldom last long. They unfold their wing-like ears
and make a frantic flutter at the sun, only to come down
beam first on some rocky islet in the Icarian sea. Their
creditors do not have even the mournful satisfaction of
contemplating the hole—the amateur editor invariably
pulls it in after him. But until his first notes fall due he
is an iridescent glory. He adores himself with a long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward and carries the
universe in his arms. He pokes his meddlesome proboscis
into everything and gives oodles of advice, unsaked. He
may not have as much principle as a tomcat in rutting
time, but he poses before all men as a "guardian of public
morals." When he places the awful seal of his disapproval
upon a fellow mortal he expects to see him shrivel
ups like a fat angle-worm on a sea-coal fire. He's a
modern Balaam, peddling God's blessings and curses—for
the long green. He imagines that an eager multitude
sit up every night to catch the first dank copy of his little
matutinal mistake—to see what he's got to
say. He's
garrulous as a toothless gran dam at a sewing circle,
as busy as a canine eunuch when his kind do congregate.
He discourses of everything, from the creation of the
universe to Farmer Brown's visit to Bugleville. He fairly
riots in editorial "leaders." He gives his "moral
support"—and nothing else—to those local enterprises whose
promoters jack him up with gobs of taffy on the mistaken
hypotheses that his "flooence" may be useful. He
has an idea that his miserable little journalistic misfit is
"making the town" and is entitled to great wads of
gratitude—that should his towline break the whole
community would go awhooping to hades, the bottom would
fall out of realty values and the streets be overgrown
with Johnson grass. So he toils and sweats and stinks—
imagines that he is roosting on the top rung of the
journalistic ladder when he hasn't even learned his trade.
Finally he falls through the bosom of his pantalettes.
The sheriff levies on his stock of editorial "we's" the
paste sours, the office cat starves, spiders festoon the
sawdust cuspidore and the dust settles like a pall on his
collection of worn type and wood-base railway cuts. The
second-hand engine ceases to snort, the rat printers
disperse and the wheezy old cylinder press no longer alarms
the neighborhood. But in a little while another yap
scraps up $40 in cash, catches a sucker to endorse his
note and there's a renascence of the old plant. It is
from shyster lawyers without clients, quack doctors without
patients and peanut politicians without pulls that the
ranks of amateur journalism are constantly recruited.
Such people always imagine it dead easy to "run" a
paper—that it is only necessary to grab the editorial
stylus and pour forth their inexhaustible fund of
misinformation to set the woods on fire. Such papers usually
manage to wiggle through the fall and winter, for they
can then sell advertising space at a dollar an acre, take
pay in soft-soap and second-hand sad-irons and still make
a reasonable profit—the time of their manipulators being
worth nothing a week; but when the long dull summer
dawns they go "up agin it" with a dull hollow groan.
Every town between Sunrise and Last Chance has had
experience galore with the amateur editor. He is one of
those unhung idiots who rush in where angels fear to
tread. He is an incorrigible but an unabateable nuisance.
He never succeeds in making money for himself; he
always manages to lose it for somebody else. You may
mark this; The quack cannot achieve permanent success
in any profession, in journalism least of all, for there his
shortcomings cannot be concealed. To become a successful
newspaper man one must begin at the bottom and climb
by pure strength through long days of labor and nights
of agony. It is the most exacting profession in the
world today. It is true that some so-called yellow
journals succeed in making money; but while they employ
perverts they have no use for Smart Alecs and amateurs.
Amateur journalists, like dog-fennel and jimson weeds,
usually blossom in Jayville. Most Southern towns have
suffered from their reckless depredations and will hail
their excoriation with delight; still it is a wicked waste
of nervo-muscular energy—the amateur journalist, like
the poor, and the megalophanous jackass, we have ever
with us.
