We are trying to work out some sort of organization, now, for
them."
"Yet you're hostile to organized labor! Who shall ever understand the
feminine mind! Some day you'll be coming to us for help."
"Very likely. It must be a curious sensation, Ban, to have the
consciousness of the power that you wield, and to be responsible to
nobody on earth."
"To the public that reads us," he corrected.
"Not a real responsibility. There is no authority over you; no appeal
from your judgments. Hasn't that something to do with people's dislike
and distrust of the newspapers; the sense that so much irresponsible
power is wrong?"
"Yet," he said, "any kind of censorship is worse than the evil it
remedies. I've never shown you my creed, have I?"
His manner was half jocular; there was a smile on his lips, but his eyes
seemed to look beyond the petty troubles and problems of his craft to a
final and firm verity.
"Tell me," she bade him.
He drew his watch out and opened the back. For a moment she thought,
with confused emotions, that she would see there a picture of herself of
which he might have possessed himself somewhere. She closed her eyes
momentarily against the fear of that anti-climax. When she opened them,
it was to read, in a clear, fine print those high and sure words of
Milton's noblest message:
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the
earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and
prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength.
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