-looking resultants, masters of nothing but
compromise, and that little fancy of an inner conspiracy of control
within the machine and behind ostensible politics is really on all fours
with the wonderful Rodin (of the Juif Errant) and as probable as
anything else in the romances of Eugene Sue.

If, on the other hand, we direct attention to the antagonistic element
in the machine, to Public Opinion, to the alleged collective mind of the
grey mass, and consider how it is brought to believe in itself and its
possession of certain opinions by the concrete evidence of daily
newspapers and eloquent persons saying as much, we may also very readily
conjure up a contrasted vision of extraordinary demagogues or newspaper
syndicates working the political machine from that direction. So far as
the demagogue goes, the increase of population, the multiplication of
amusements and interests, the differentiation of social habits, the
diffusion of great towns, all militate against that sufficient gathering
of masses of voters in meeting-houses which gave him his power in the
recent past. It is improbable that ever again will any flushed
undignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessant
operation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity,
talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows of
railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel
balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits--tireless and
undammable--rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state
in the world. Continually the individual vocal demagogue dwindles, and
the element of bands and buttons, the organization of the press and
procession, the share of the machine, grows.

Mr. Harmsworth, of the London _Daily Mail_, in a very interesting
article has glanced at certain possibilities of power that may vest in
the owners of a great system of world-wide "simultaneous" newspapers,
but he does not analyze the nature of the influence exercised by
newspapers during the successive phases of the nineteenth century, nor
the probable modifications of that influence in the years to come, and I
think, on the whole, he inclines very naturally to over estimate the
amount of intentional direction that may be given by the owner of a
paper to the minds and acts of his readers, and to exceed the very
definite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlier
Victorian period, the more limite