In Newport, New York, Washington, it is the same thing. The unbounded
appetite for private information about public or semi-public people creates
its own purveyors; and these, again, learn to believe with unflinching
heartiness in the work they do. I have rarely encountered a successful
correspondent of this description who had not become thoroughly convinced
that the highest desire of every human being is to see his name in print,
no matter how. Unhappily, there is a great deal to encourage this belief: I
have known men to express great indignation at an unexpected
newspaper-puff, and then to send ten dollars privately to the author. This
is just the calamity of the profession, that it brings one in contact with
this class of social hypocrites; and the "personal" correspondent gradually
loses faith that there is any other class to be found. Then there is the
perilous temptation to pay off grudges in this way, to revenge slights, by
the use of a power with which few people are safely to be trusted. In many
cases, such a correspondent is simply a child playing with poisoned arrows:
he poisons others; and it is no satisfaction to know that in time he may
also poison himself, and paralyze his own power for mischief.

There lies before me a letter written some years ago to a young lady
anxious to enter on this particular "career of letters,"--a letter from an
experienced New York journalist. He has employed, he says, hundreds of lady
correspondents, for little or no compensation; and one of his few
successful writers he thus describes: "She succeeds by pushing her way into
society, and extracting information from fashionable people and officials
and their wives.... She flatters the vain, and overawes the weak, and gets
by sheer impudence what other writers cannot.... I would not wish you to be
like her, or reduced to the necessity of doing what she does, for any
success journalism can possibly give." And who can help echoing this
opinion? If this is one of the successful laborers, where shall we place
the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or failure, the greater honor?