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. He may be a man who writes constantly himself, but it is just as likely that he never writes at all.

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

making. This was making bricks without straw with a vengeance.

On another occasion, a well-known writer received as his portion a text so infinitely small that he felt everything must depend upon his own ingenuity. He sat down, cudgelled his brains for a couple of hours, and finally produced a smart and lively article, the only fault of which was, that it did not contain the slightest allusion to the subject to which it was supposed to refer, and consequently left the reader in a state of hopeless bewilderment as to the reason for the expenditure of so much wit and learning.

But let us suppose, in the present instance, that Parliament is sitting, and the Reform debates of the year 1866, say, at their height. There is therefore no dearth of subjects, and very quickly the editor's secretary or assistant has his sheet filled with the various topics suggested. These are: Mr. Beales and Mr. Walpole; The London Conference on the Luxemburg Question; Italian Finance; The Trades' Union Commission; The Tailors' Strike; The Last Case of Justices' Justice. But here are six subjects, and at the most but four leaders are wanted, only three of which will in all probability be used. So the weeding-out process has to begin. 'Italian Finance won't suffer by being

kept over for a day; put it down for to-morrow,' says the editor. 'Tailors' Strike: ah, Thompson wrote on that last week; it's too soon to be at it again.'

There then remain four questions to be considered, and over these the battle-royal begins. First comes the great cause of Beales (M.A.) versus Walpole. Four members of the council think as badly of Beales (M.A.) as of Walpole, and say so in the plainest terms. One is full of sympathy for the Home Secretary, and earnestly pleads his cause against the bullies of the Reform League. Two others, however, are just as enthusiastic on behalf of the ex-revising barrister. The discussion which takes place is at least as warm as that which is subsequently held in the House,' and it is enlivened by a capital anecdote from our Bohemian, of which each gentleman present mentally makes a note, for use in future leaders. Finally, the question is settled by the majority of votes, and it is decided that a castigation shall be administered equally to the Reform League and the government in the leader which is to be devoted to the exciting subject. Then the editor hastily sketches in a dozen lines the tone of the article as it has been decided upon by the council, and gives the paper to one of the members of the triumphant majority. About the next question-the Luxem