22 AUGUST 1903, Page 2

But though we welcome the experiment, Mr. Pulitzer will, we

fear, find that his larger ideas will fail. He might as well try to breed poets as journalists. No education, no training, no gifts even, will make a successful journalist without the something which induces people to read what he has to say, and that something is probably born of a sympathy between him and them which is incommunicable.

Yon could not make a Macaulay, and Macaulay would probably have been the most successful journalist who ever lived, and even he might have been beaten by Cobbett, who had none of his intellectual training. Experienced owners of newspapers know well that their best writers are improved but little by experience, and that the effect of thorough early training is often to create an impassable gap between the writer and his audience. Few of the great actors have been "born in the sawdust," and scarcely any statesmen—the Pitts being the great exception—have transmitted their qualities.