There is a hunger in this business that never sleeps — the hunger to grow, to buy up the rival paper, to own the wire service, to own the paper mill, to own everything a story touches before it reaches a reader's hands. I know this hunger. I built an empire chasing it. So when I hear that a judge somewhere has stopped one more giant deal — one more combination of properties too large for any single conscience to govern — I do not need the particulars. I have lived the particulars. Only the numbers have grown; the appetite is the same one I recognized in myself and in Mr. Hearst thirty years ago.

We are living in an age of trusts. Mr. Rockefeller has his oil, Mr. Morgan his steel, and the newspapermen of my generation have been building trusts of our own, quietly, one acquired title at a time. I did it. The World swallowed competitors. Hearst swallowed more. We told ourselves bigness meant better journalism — more correspondents, more presses, more reach for the truth. Sometimes that was so. But I have also seen what happens when a handful of men, driven by the same three motives that drive every combination — profit, power, and the fear of being left behind — come to control what millions of citizens are permitted to know. A newspaper is not a spice factory or a railroad. When you consolidate flour mills, you raise the price of bread. When you consolidate the presses, you can decide what your neighbors are allowed to believe about their own government. That is a different order of danger, and I do not think the courts or the public have ever fully reckoned with it.

I built circulation with sensation, I confess it plainly — I am not a man who pretends otherwise. But I came, late in life, to a harder understanding: that a press owned by too few hands, however brilliant those hands, becomes a private telegraph line rather than a public trust. This is why I put my money into training journalists and rewarding their best work rather than merely buying more presses. A prize cannot stop a merger. But