POWERFUL EDITORS.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1918, Page 2

POWERFUL EDITORS.

One day last month, two editors divided the attention of the whole world. That is a good deal to say about two individiiaJs, but in this e&se it is true. In France the President of the Republic summoned Georges Cleinenceau, editor of "L'Honune Enchaine" (now again "L'Homme Libre") to form a Cabinet. In England Editor Alfred Harmsworth, some years under the title of Lord Northcliffe, scornfully rejected an offer of a place in the Ministry and seized tho opportunity to strike a powerful blow at -the soft and talkative gentlemen who surround Lloyd George. Both men gainled their eminence—one as Premier of France, and the other as the most powerful public man in Great Britain—by being good editors, by exercising fearlessly for what they thought the good of the country, their influence as journalists. Ctemencea.ii is a poor maji with one little' journal printed on coarse paper. Northcliffe is rich, he owns perhaps a down of publications.. The owners of "The Man in Chains" and the London Times succeeded in like degrees through different mediums because both possess those qualities of courage, honesty and intelligence—especially courage —which people always follow when they find' them combined in an individual in public life. Clemenceau'? first paper was called "The Freeman." When the Government. bothered him and closed his print shop he changed the name to "The Man in Chains," and went 011 keeping the censor busy and flaying incompetence, ignorance, and graft in office. When Northcliffe attacked the Government for not supplying the army with high-explos-ive shells, tile stockbrokers of London made bonfires of his papers, and Government officials threatened—but threatened very softly—to suppress them. But he went on hammering the business-after-the-port statesmen until they sent the army the right shells to shoot at the concrete and barbed wire of the Germans.