Evening Capital

Judge Neville did the righteous and proper thing, says the Washington Star, when he dismissed the criminal libel suit brought by the president of the St. Louis school board against the city editor of a St. Louis newspaper. The court held that it was the privilege of a newspaper to criticise a public official, provided, of course, that the criticism was not based upon personal malice. To this decision no exception will be taken except by officials who have been or are being or are likely to be criticised; for it is one of the strange things of to-day that when a man ceases to be a purely private citizen and achieves official position he almost invariably arrives, by a short cut, at the conclusion that the office with which he is temporarily associated is his own property and that his official actions should be entirely above and beyond the reach of those "ghouls of the press" who so frequently insist upon the asking of most inconvenient questions in the public behalf.