Democratic Sentinel, Volume 21, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1897 — Writing a Leader. [ARTICLE]

Writing a Leader.

The late Alexander Russel, the famous editor of the Scotsman, the leading journal of Scotland, was not an easy writer—that Is, he was neither fluent nor quick with his pen. He rarely wrote under pressure, for he disliked to be pushed, aud declared that haste militated against good writing and sound thinking. He cared for Ideas expressed in “good phrasing;” but the form was always to him of less value than the substance. When Mr. Russel had chosen the topic for a leader—he Insisted that the leading article of to-day was all the better for being on the subject of the day before yesterday—he would walk about the room, thlnls over the matter, and joit down his thoughts in shorthand at his writing table. Unconsciously to the thinker, the process of thinking out a leader was associated with odd motions of his arms and hands. Once the absurdity of his method was revealed to him by a lady, an excellent mimic. The story is told In “An Editor’s Retrospect,” the title of Mr. C. A. Cooper’s book. Mr. Russel had shut himself up in a country house to work, unaware that his room was overlooked from a neighboring window. After dinner this lady, who had observed him, asked their host if he would like to know how a leading article was written. Getting up and walking about the room, she mimicked the editor’s throes, shrugs, jerks, head-scratchings, pen-bitings, and other incongruous movements. Mr. Barrie, In his recent memoir of his mother, “Margaret Ogilvey,” describes himself as making strange faces over his writing. “It is my contemptible weakness,” he writes, “that if I say a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; If he frowns or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or. given to contortions, I cringe or twist my legs until I have to stop writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw my mustache with him. If the character be a lady, with an exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely.” When Mr. Russel’s children were very young, he would often have one or two of them in the room where he was writing that he might spell himself by romping with them. Once Mr. Cooper remarked to Russel’s sister that a certain article of his must have been written while he was in excellent spirits. “Yes,” said she, “the last paragraph means that he had a roll on the carpet with Johnny and Janet.”

Australia Las found it ispossible to abate the rabbit plague. In New Souta Wales alone 7,000,000 acres of lend have been abandoned and $5,000,009 spent. The only plan that has any good effect is wire netting, and of i.Lls 15,000 miles have been used. Five-sixths of the men at Oxford and Cambridge universities are teetotaler*