The press being forbidden to cover Saint Cecilia events, there grew up in the vulgar mind weird stories of what went on behind the scenes.  While the Saint Cecilia has enjoyed the happy privilege of journalistic silence, it has, therefore, correspondingly suffered on the tongue of gossip.  The truth is that we always knew that the Saint Cecilia was just about the same as every other social collection of human beings—­a little gaiety flavored with a little frivolity; nothing more, nothing less.

There was a time when this society was the extreme limit of social exclusiveness.  It was an anachronism on American soil, a matter of pure heredity, the right to membership in which was as fixed as Median law, but transcendently above the median line.  Now, however, since the society, in keeping with the spirit of the age, has relaxed its rules to admit from year to year (if, indeed, only a few now and then) members whose blood is far from indigo, we think it perfectly legitimate for the newspaper, which represents ALL classes of people, to invade the quondam sanctity of its functions which are now being OPENED to all classes.

Following this, the editorial quoted from Don Seitz’s book, telling how the elder James Gordon Bennett was in the habit of mocking “events to which he was not invited,” and how, in 1840, he managed to get one of his reporters into “Henry I Brevoort’s fancy dress ball, the social event of the period.”  The quotation from Mr. Seitz’s book ends with the following:  “A far cry from this to 1894, when Ward McAlister, arbiter of the ‘400’ at Mrs. Astor’s famous ball, became a leader on social topics for the New York ‘World.’  It took many years for this umbrage at the reporting of social events to wear off and make the reporter welcome.  Indeed, there is one place yet on the map where it is not even now permitted to record a social event, though the editors and owners of papers may be among those present.  That is Charleston, South Carolina....”

The Charleston editor then resumes his own reflections in this wise: 

We regret to say, and it is the regret of our life, that we were not one of the editors present at the Saint Cecilia.  This, therefore, relieves us of the implied condition to adhere any longer to this silly and absurd custom which, in the language of this great newspaper man, has made its last stand “on the map” at Charleston.  We are glad that we have forever nailed, in the opinion of one hundred million ordinary people who make the American nation, the absurdity that there is any social event so sacred, any people so DIFFERENT from the rest of us poor human beings, that we dare not speak of them.

Just why private social events should be, as Mr. Grace seems to assume, particularly the property of the press, it is somewhat difficult to explain, unless we do so by accepting as fundamental the theory that the press is justified in invading personal privacy purely in order to pander, on the one hand to the new breed of vulgar rich which thrives on “publicity,” and on the other, to the breed of vulgar poor which enjoys reading that supremest of American inanities, the “society page.”