With everything else favorable, West would cheerfully have accepted
these things, as being inextricably embedded in the nature of the work.
But unfortunately, everything else was not favorable. Deeper than the
grind of the routine detail, was the constant opposition and adverse
criticism to which his newspaper, like every other one, was incessantly
subjected. It has long been a trite observation that no reader of any
newspaper is so humble as not to be outspokenly confident that he could
run that paper a great deal better than those who actually are running
it. Every upstanding man who pays a cent for a daily journal considers
that he buys the right to abuse it, nay incurs the manly duty of abusing
it. Every editor knows that the highest praise he can expect is silence.
If his readers are pleased with his remarks, they nobly refrain from
comment. But if they disagree with one jot or tittle of his high-speed
dissertations, he must be prepared to have quarts of ink squirted at him
forthwith.
Now this was exactly the reverse of Editor West's preferences. He liked
criticism of him to be silent, and praise of him to be shouted in the
market-place.
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