Papers.

'OUR LEADING COLUMNS.

EVERY MAN, we are told, imagines himself competent to drive a gig, stir a fire, and write a leading article. Of the two former accomplishments I cannot say much. As I have never pretended to possess them myself, I shall not attempt to impart them to others; but the third is an accomplishment which is so mysterious in the eyes of the uninitiated, and at the same time appears to the presumptuous to be of such easy acquirement, that 'a leader-writer' can hardly fail to interest somebody if he attempts a faithful exposition of the sublime mysteries of his craft.

The 'leader,' as it now appears in the full glories of long primer in our morning and evening journals, is, it need hardly be said, an essentially modern creation. The man who takes up a volume of the 'Times' or the 'Morning Chronicle' for one of the

early years of the present century, will be sadly disappointed if he expects to find in either anything resembling the articles which are now provided for him every day. A few bald lines of summary, and a stilted and ungrammatical sentence feebly echoing the gossip of the town, are all that he will find in the columns which are now filled with essays often of remarkable literary ability, and almost always written with force, clearness, and elegance. But it has been by long years of slow and weary progress that the editorial 'we' has attained its present position; and even now there are but few persons— beyond the limited number behind the sceneswho have any adequate idea of the combination of industry and talent which has daily to be put in force in order to produce the leading columns of a London morning newspaper.

The great blunder of the newspaper reader is in supposing that there is such a being as an actual owner of the 'we,' who is alone allowed to use it, and who is the author of all the articles in which it makes its appearance in any particular newspaper. The truth is, that the 'we' is a literal fact, and not, as most people suppose, a mere figment invented for the purpose of giving dignity and emphasis to an individual expression of opinion. With hardly an exception, the leading articles of

the London press, and especially those dealing with the more important political topics of the day, are more or less the work not of one single person, but of several gentlemen, combined for the purpose, almost all of whom have had some hand in the dish which is finally set before the public. These gentlemen are the leader-writers of the press, and the position they hold is a very curious and anomalous one. They are not editors-an editor may be a leader-writer also, though even that is not always the case; but the ordinary leader-writer has no pretensions to the superior dignity. And whilst they rank beneath the editor-in-chief, they place an immeasurable gulf between themselves and his lieutenant the sub-editor, who perhaps comes nearer to the popular notion of what a newspaper editor is than any other member of the staff.

The 'sub' is regarded by the leader-writer as a mere paste-and-scissors man, and is accordingly treated by him with an amount of contempt, to which, I am bound to say, he is very seldom entitled. The leader-writer has nothing to do with the internal management of the office in which he is engaged; except on rare occasions, he knows scarcely anything of the news which the sub-editor is gathering in from all quarters of the globe for the next morning's issue; and he has only a limited voice

in directing the policy of the journal to which he is attached—a policy to which he is not unfrequently personally opposed. What, then, are his special functions?

I cannot better answer the question than by describing the manner in which, every day in the week, the leaders of at least one morning journal are produced. Scene the first opens in the consultation room' in the newspaper office in the city. The time is an hour after noon, and the persons of the drama are some half-dozen gentlemen, of various ages. There is a poet, whose works have never sold; a novelist, who is happy in being able to command the respect of publishers; the son of a peer, who was once in a cavalry regiment; a barrister, who finds leaders bring him more guineas than he gets from his briefs; a literary Bohemian, who has travelled over half the world, and who has seen everything, from the inside of Whitecross Street Prison to the Kremlin at Moscow; and a leader-writer pure and simple, whose name has never been heard outside one or two quiet clubs off the Strand, but who is every day helping to mould the opinions of the public, and whose influence on those opinions it is difficult to over-estimate. Gathered together around a table, the little company so formed is presided over by the

nominal editor of the journal. who writes constantly himself, likely that he never writes at all.

He may be a man

but it is just as

The first business to be gone through consists of a choice of subjects for the articles for the next day; and this, perhaps, is the most difficult part of the whole matter. Only those who have been forced to go on writing day after day for months and years together, and who every morning have had to find some new topic on which to discourse, can have any notion of the difficulty which the necessity of making such a choice presents. When parliament is up, and the dull season in full swing, leader-writers are driven almost to distraction in their search for 'something new.' How they scan the columns of despised 'local prints,' and how eagerly they dart upon the smallest paragraph, the most trumpery police case, that seems likely to afford a text for a social leader of the humorous or pathetic sort! On one occasion, a leader-writer of my acquaintance was told to write upon anything he liked, the editor informing him in despair that the only subject he could give him was-Nothing! He took the hint, and actually wrote a leader upon the difficulty of finding subjects to comment upon in those sleepy August days when all the town was holiday