t degree.

In the long run this must count. Of all the various reforms that are
talked of at Oxford, and of all the imitations of American methods that
are suggested, the only one worth while, to my thinking, is to capture
a few millionaires, give them honorary degrees at a million pounds
sterling apiece, and tell them to imagine that they are Henry the
Eighth. I give Oxford warning that if this is not done the place will
not last another two centuries.

VI. The British and the American Press

THE only paper from which a man can really get the news of the world in
a shape that he can understand is the newspaper of his own "home town."
For me, unless I can have the Montreal Gazette at my breakfast, and the
Montreal Star at my dinner, I don't really know what is happening. In
the same way I have seen a man from the south of Scotland settle down to
read the Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satisfaction: and a man
from Burlington, Vermont, pick up the Burlington Eagle and study
the foreign news in it as the only way of getting at what was really
happening in France and Germany.

The reason is, I suppose, that there are different ways of serving up
the news and we each get used to our own. Some people like the news
fed to them gently: others like it thrown at them in a bombshell: some
prefer it to be made as little of as possible; they want it minimised:
others want the maximum.

This is where the greatest difference lies between the British
newspapers and those of the United States and Canada. With us in America
the great thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader; in
England they get the news and then break it to him as gently as
possible. Hence the big headings, the bold type, and the double columns
of the American paper, and the small headings and the general air of
quiet and respectability of the English Press.

It is quite beside the question to ask which is the better. Neither is.
They are different things: that's all. The English newspaper is designed
to be read quietly, propped up against the sugar bowl of a man eating
a slow breakfast in a quiet corner of a club, or by a retired banker
seated in a leather chair nearly asleep, or by a country vicar sitting
in a wicker chair under a pergola. The American paper is for reading
by a man hanging on the straps of a clattering subway express, by a
man eating at a lunch counter, by a man standing on one leg, by a man
getting a two-minute shave, o