Nobody in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was falling
into a stale Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick.
This is the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard.
It is not merely that journalism is victorious over literature.
It is that bad journalism is victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is being
ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or unclean.
It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to a better.
If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that Pearson's
Magazine is poor and weak popular journalism. You will know it
as certainly as you know bad butter. You will know as certainly
that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand,
in the great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism.
Mr. Pearson has been a monument of this enormous banality.
About everything he says and does there is something infinitely
weak-minded. He clamours for home trades and employs foreign
ones to print his paper. When this glaring fact is pointed out,
he does not say that the thing was an oversight, like a sane man.
He cuts it off with scissors, like a child of three. His very cunning
is infantile. And like a child of three, he does not cut it quite off.
In all human records I doubt if there is such an example of a profound
simplicity in deception. This is the sort of intelligence which now
sits in the seat of the sane and honourable old Tory journalism.
If it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of the
Yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still tropical. But it is not.
We are delivered over to the bramble, and from the meanest of
the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure