“No.”

Early in Banneker’s editorship it had been agreed that he should keep free of any business or advertising complications.  Experience and the warnings of Russell Edmonds had told him that the only course of editorial independence lay in totally ignoring the effect of what he might write upon the profits and prejudices of the advertisers, who were, of course, the principal support of the paper.  Furthermore, Banneker heartily despised about half of the advertising which the paper carried; dubious financial proffers, flamboyant mercantile copy of diamond dealers, cheap tailors, installment furniture profiteers, the lure of loan sharks and race-track tipsters, and the specious and deadly fallacies of the medical quacks.  Appealing as it did to an ignorant and “easy” class of the public ("Banneker’s First-Readers,” Russell Edmonds was wont to call them), The Patriot offered a profitable field for all the pitfall-setters of print.  The less that Banneker knew about them the more comfortable would he be.  So he turned his face away from those columns.

The negative which he returned to Marrineal’s question was no more or less than that astute gentleman expected.

“We carried an editorial last week on cigarettes, ’There’s a Yellow Stain on Your Boy’s Fingers—­Is There Another on his Character?’”

“Yes.  It is still bringing in letters.”

“It is.  Letters of protest.”

“From the tobacco people?”

“Exactly.  Mr. Banneker, don’t you regard tobacco as a legitimate article of use?”

“Oh, entirely.  Couldn’t do without it, myself.”

“Why attack it, then, in your column?”

“Because my column,” answered Banneker with perceptible emphasis on the possessive, “doesn’t believe that cigarettes are good for boys.”

“Nobody does.  But the effect of your editorial is to play into the hands of the anti-tobacco people.  It’s an indiscriminate onslaught on all tobacco.  That’s the effect of it.”

“Possibly.”

“And the result is that the tobacco people are threatening to cut us off from their new advertising appropriation.”

“Out of my department,” said Banneker calmly.

Marrineal was a patient man.  He pursued.  “You have offended the medical advertisers by your support of the so-called Honest Label Bill.”

“It’s a good bill.”

“Nearly a quarter of our advertising revenue is from the patent-medicine people.”

“Mostly swindlers.”

“They pay your salary,” Marrineal pointed out.

“Not mine,” said Banneker vigorously.  “The paper pays my salary.”

“Without the support of the very advertisers that you are attacking, it couldn’t continue to pay it.  Yet you decline to admit any responsibility to them.”

“Absolutely.  To them or for them.”

“I confess I can’t see your basis,” said the reasonable Marrineal.  “Considering what you have received in income from the paper—­”