PAMPHLET. 263 



The proposal did not take my fancy at all. I did not like 

 the centralization idea ; nor could I realize what my 

 position as .Editor would be with a Sub-Editor who, as a 

 Proprietor of the paper, would, of course, be one of my 

 employers, and be perhaps backed, to boot, in his cen- 

 tralization views, by the influence of Dr Candlish. And 

 as the time had not yet come for proposing that I 

 " ought not to be Editor " of the Witness, the design was 

 suffered to drop. 



'What, however, I most dreaded in the scheme was, I 

 must say, the direct control of some Edinburgh Com- 

 mittee, and the inevitable effect of the arrangement on 

 the centralization jealousy outside. It is of great ad- 

 vantage to a purely political newspaper, that it should 

 be the accredited organ of the Government of the day. 

 The Ministry, as such, is a standing part of the Consti- 

 tution, it is the Monarch in his responsible servants ; 

 and its choice of a newspaper, as an organ through 

 which to speak, imparts to the Paper selected not a little 

 of that weight which the Treasury must always possess. 

 But it is not according to the constitution of Presbytery 

 that it should have a central government, analogous to a 

 King's Ministry, and armed with a sort of secular Trea- 

 sury influence. Nor, were the peculiar necessities of 

 some Presbyterian Church to demand that a body of the 

 kind should be called into existence, would it be desir- 

 able or prudent to put into its hands any such control 

 over the newspaper press of the body, as that which a 

 King's Ministry possesses, and ought to possess, over its 

 organ. And, further, were the true Presbyterian pulses 

 to beat vigorously in the body, and were its Presbyter- 

 ianism to be of the old earnest school, that man might 

 be well deemed over-sanguine who would calculate large- 

 ly on the influence and success of a press so controlled 



