THE VENOMOUS "WE."

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 4011, 30 May 1884, Page 4

THE VENOMOUS "WE."

(By Bill Nye.) The world is full of literary people today, and they are divided into three classes, xix. —Those who have written for tho press, those who are writing for the press, and those who want to write for the press. Of the first there are those who tried it and found that they could make more in half the time at something else, and so quit the field, and those who failed to touch the great heart and pocket-book of the public, and therefore subsided. Those who are writing for the press now, whether putting together copy by the mile within sound of the rumbling engine and press, or scattered throug-h the country, writing , more at their leisure, find that they have to lay aside every weight and throw off all the incumbrances of the mossy past. One thing, however, still clings to the editor like a dab of paste on a white vest, or a golden flock of scrambled egg on a tawny moustache. One relic of barbarism roars its gaunt form mid tho clash and hurry and rush of civilisation and in tho dazzling light of science and smartness. It is " we."

The building editor of the rural civiliser for tho first time peels his coat and sharpens his pencil to begin the work of changing tho great current of public opinion. He is strong in his desire to knock error and wrong galley West. He has buckled on his armour to paralyse monopoly and to purify the ballot. He has latched up his pantaloons with a noble resolve and covered his table with virgin paper. He is young, and he is a little egotistical also. He wants to say "I believe "so and so, but he can't. Perspiration breaks out all over him. He bites his pencil and looks up with his clenched hand in his hair. The slimy demon of tho editor's lifo is there, sitting on the cloth-bound volume containing the report of tho United States Superintendent of Swine Diseases.

AVherover you find a young man unloading a Washington hand-press to fill a long felt want, there you will find the ghastly and venomous '' we '' ready to look over .the shoulder of the timid young mental athlete. Wherever you find a ring of printer's ink around the door-knob, and tho snowy towel on which the foreman wipes the pink tips of his alabaster fingers, you will find the slimy, scaly folds of "we" curled up in some neighboring corner. From the huge metropolitan journal, whose subscribers could make or bust a president, or make a blooming king wish he had never been born, down to the obscure and unknown dodger whose first page is mostly electrotype head, wkose second and third are patent, whose news is eloquent of the dear dead past, whose fourth page ushers in a new baby or heralds the coming of the circus, or promulgates the fact that its giant editor has a felon on his thumb, tho trail of the serpent "we" is over them all. It is all we have to remind us of royalty in America, with the exception, perhaps, of the case now and then where a king full busts a bobtail flush. <' We " must go.