Editorials make newspapers into citizens.

Without an editorial page, you don't have a newspaper.

"Boredom with established truths is a great enemy of free men," political scientist Bernard Crick wrote in the early 1960s in an essay titled "In Defence of Politics."

So, he said, sometimes the most useful thing a scholar of politics can do is "try to make some old platitudes pregnant."

As it is in politics, so is it in journalism. We have no new defenses for editorial writing, just the same old few that students have studied and practitioners have appreciated as long as America has had a free press.

Most of the defenses are hopelessly high-minded and idealistic. But they are real and valid - "established truths." The question is whether these "old platitudes" once again can be made pregnant, full of meaning.

I suspect that what's really needed is a defense less of editorial writing than of editorial publishing. In our present age, characterized by the tyranny of the bottom line, editorial pages stand out even within editorial departments as cost centers rather than profit centers. And that leads to the question: Why do it if it doesn't make a profit?

To the people who founded most American newspapers, that question would seem absurd, as it ought to seem to us today. Without an editorial page, you have no newspaper. You may have a sale paper, an advertiser, maybe even with some "news" copy sprinkled in. But there is no newspaper.

The newspaper is a business, to be sure, and so it must pursue profits. But it is a business with a difference. That difference accounts for the enshrinement in the First Amendment of the freedom of the press.

The newspaper exists not just to make a profit, or even to collect and disseminate the information that its readers need to discharge their responsibilities as citizens. No, the newspaper exists to be a citizen of the community, fostering the sort of reasoned thought and civil discourse on the issues of the day that are every citizen's right and obligation.

Editorial writing - passionate, disciplined discourse - is essential to the discharge of that right and duty.

Like many other editorial boards, we at The Chicago Tribune have adopted the practice of inviting guests to sit in on our deliberations (I use the word intentionally) and to listen and contribute to the discussions. Invariably, they express sentiments afterwards saying in effect, "It's good to know that people are there who are thinking in that way about the issues."

We who get to do this kind of work all the time often don't appreciate what a rare privilege it is. Very few of our fellow citizens get to sit on a daily basis with intelligent, well-informed people and debate the great (and small) public issues of the day - much less to write about them and have their arguments and conclusions read by thousands of people. We serve an important purpose just by exemplifying for the community what active citizenship is about.

None of this gets to the ability of a newspaper, through its editorial page, to move public officials, captains of industry, and others to act for what we consider the public good. We don't, I fear, move them often enough and vigorously enough. But it is one of the purposes of editorial writing, and one no newspaper worth the name would forswear.

Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune.