390 LIFE OF COBDEN. (OHA.

1863.
Air. 59.

Times. Under such circumstances I cannot allow you to suppress your
individuality, and shield yourself under the third person of the editorial
nominative, in a correspondence affecting your personal responsibility for
a scandalous aspersion on myself (as I now learn for the first time from
you) as well as on Mr. Bright. ]
Your refusal to publish my former letter is a matter so entirely within
your own province, that I have nothing to say upon it, except to i
gratulate myself on the recent revolution in the newspaper world, which
renders your decision comparatively harmless. A few years ago the
Times possessed almost a monopoly of publicity. Four-fifths of the daily
newspaper circulation issued from its press. Now it constitutes, probably,
one-tenth of our diurnal journalism, and my letter will be only the more
generally read from having been excluded from your columns, .
But your letter proceeds to offer some most singular arguments 1
justification of your attack on Mr. Bright. You state that your journal
had previously contained two leading articles, casting the same imputation
 both on him and myself, that you had challenged us to disavow your
interpretation of our speeches, and ag we had failed to do so, you accepted
our silence as an acknowledgment of the truth of your interpretation,—
in other words, as proof of our guilt! Here we have, in a compendious
form, an exhibition of those qualities which characterize the editorial
management of the Zimes,—of that arrogant self-complacency, logical
incoherence, and moral bewilderment, which a too long career of impunity
and irresponsibility could alone engender.
Now that which lies at the basis of this reasoning, if such it may be
termed, is an inordinate display of what I must call Times egotism.
Notwithstanding that your journal has now but a fractional part of the
Jaily newspaper circulation, you complacently assume that all the world
are your constant readers. The Times never enters my house, except bY
rare accident. This I know to be also the case with Mr. Bright, who
will, in all probability, never have seen your attack until he reads it i
my letter. It is only during the Session, at the Club, that I am in the
habit of seeing your paper. The chance visit of a friend last Friday
placed in my hand the Times of the previous day, when that scandalous
paragraph caught my eye which formed the text of my letter to you. 1
was entirely ignorant of the two former attacks, which, by a droll process
of reasoning, you now invite me to accept as a justification of the third.
Now, let me ask you to descend for a minute from your editorial chair
while I illustrate this logic by a hypothetical case put to Mr. Delane, the
barrister. Suppose that the constituents of Mr. Bright were to indict
your publisher for defaming their member, and that jt was proposed in 8
sonsultation of lawyers, at which you were present, to set up as a plea of
justification at the trial that the same libel had been twice previously