Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;
writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to be
not only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought always
to be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. The
journalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret the
origin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to put
us who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of Jesuits
or Freemasons.
As has often been said, anonymity would be all very well if one could
for a moment imagine that it was established from good motives. Suppose,
for instance, that we were all quite certain that the men on the
_Thunderer_ newspaper were a band of brave young idealists who were so
eager to overthrow Socialism, Municipal and National, that they did not
care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it
down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe,
or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the
_Thunderer_ arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil motives,
any one of which would lose simply by being named. A jerry-builder
whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and becomes the
_Thunderer_.
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