3 NOVEMBER 1923, Page 3

Nothing could have been more appropriate than that the first

action of the new newspaper syndicate should have been to suppress the Pall Mall Gazette. A paper whose name was taken from Thackeray's Pendennio—a paper "written for gentlemen by gentlemen "—which had been edited by such men as Frederick Greenwood, John Morley, W. T. Stead, Henry Cust, and Mr. J. L. Garvin, was an anachronism to the lords of modern journalism. So on Saturday last it was published for the last time. True, as it appeared in its last years it could hardly have offended our modern conceptions of jour- nalism so much as the names of its editors, its motto, or the origin of its title might suggest. But some savour of other ways perhaps remained, and so it has been absorbed into the Evening Standard, whose tradition is less dangerous. Thus a chapter of journalistic history closes, or rather is closed, by those to whom history means little, even if they do not in their hearts join Mr. henry Ford in his graphic phrase that "history is all Bunk."