As it stands, it is the heaviest indictment of the
popular taste that can be made. There is no vice so mean as impertinent
curiosity, and it is upon this curiosity that the Yellow Press meanly
lives and meanly thrives.

What is the remedy? There is none, unless time brings with it a natural
reaction. It is as desperate a task to touch the Press as to change the
Constitution. The odds against reform are too great. A law to check
the exuberance of newspapers would never survive the attacks of the
newspapers themselves.

Nor is it only in America that reform is necessary. The Press of Europe,
also, has strayed so far from its origins as to be a danger to the
State. In their inception the newspapers were given freedom, that they
might expose and check the corruption and dishonesty of politicians. It
was thought that publicity was the best cure for intrigue. For a while
the liberty of the Press seemed justified. It is justified no longer.
The licence which it assumes has led to far worse evils than those
which it was designed to prevent. In other words, the slave has become
a tyrant, and where is the statesman who shall rid us of this tyranny?
Failure alone can kill what lives only upon popular success, and it
is the old-fashioned, self-respecting journals which are facing ruin.
Prosperity is with the large circulations, and a large circulation is no
test of merit. Success is made neither by honesty nor wisdom. The people
will buy what flatters its vanity or appeals to its folly. And the
Yellow Press will flourish, with its headlines and its vulgarity, until
the mixed population of America has sufficiently mastered the art of
life and the English tongue to demand something better wherewith to
solace its leisure than scandal and imbecility.

LIBERTY AND PATRIOTISM.

Guarding the entrance to New York there stands, lofty and austere, the
statue of Liberty. It is this statue which immigrants, on their way to
Ellis Island, are wont to apostrophise. To contemplate it is, we are
told, to know the true meaning of life, to taste for the first time
the sweets of an untrammelled freedom. No sooner does M. Bartholdi's
beneficent matron smile upon you, than you cast off the chains of
an ancient slavery. You forget in a moment the years which you have
misspent under the intolerable burden of a monarch. Be you Pole or Russ,
Briton or Ruthenian, you rejoice at the mere sight of this marvel, in a
new hope, in a boundless ambition.