hankful also for
the penny-a-liner, whether ancient or modern, who reflects the whims
and humors, the enthusiasms and weaknesses, of the public in unguarded
moments. Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be interesting
ourselves in other quite as nugatory matters if these were denied us?
In one respect, and no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion of
news and the universal interest in it have affected the national
thought and character. The whole people have acquired a certain
metropolitan temper; they feel everything at once and in common; a
single pulse sends anger, grief, or triumph through the whole country;
one man sitting at the keyboard of the telegraph in Washington sets the
chords vibrating to the same tune from sea to sea; and this
simultaneousness, this unanimity, deepens national consciousness and
intensifies popular emotion. Every man feels himself a part, sensitive
and sympathetic, of this vast organism, a partner in its life or death.
The sentiment of patriotism is etherealized and ennobled by it, is
kindled by the more or less conscious presence of an ideal element; and
the instinctive love of a few familiar hills and fields widens, till
Country is no longer an abstraction, but a living presence, felt in the
heart and operative in the conscience, like that of an absent mother.
It is no trifling matter that thirty millions of men should be thinking
the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time,
and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood
more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human
Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his
net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never
heard of Caesar or of Caesar's murder; but the shot that shattered the
forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most
American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and
breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of
indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of
Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror
a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if
history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy,
so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might
seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the
great god Pan alive again to make the