the end of the article which i write is always cut off, and, unfortunately, i belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail is important. it is not anybody's fault but my own; it arises from the fact that i take such a long time to get to the point. somebody, the other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write prefaces. he was perfectly right, for i always write a preface to the preface, and then i am stopped; also quite justifiably.

in my last article i said that i favoured three things—first, the legal punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction, in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of cases upon the signing of articles. it was at this point that i was cut short, i will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own lawlessness in the matter of space. in any case, there is something more that ought to be said.

it would be an exaggeration to say that i hope some day to see an anonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. for some time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing the policy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at any rate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never think the worse of any one for writing one. but i should certainly say that writing anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that of the leading article. 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.