ere is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed
sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for
the _mens sana_ of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that
the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national
status in our own esteem.

But even our secondary public interests are not in vital matters. The
traveller returning to London in the summer of 1921 plunges into a
whole series of unsavoury divorce cases being threshed out in public.
Divorce is applied for, considered, granted, in every capital in
Europe, but nowhere does it receive the publicity in the Press that it
does in England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of
private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public
consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to
hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit,
and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks
in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in
England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, but Paris, with
all its men-and-women troubles, has no salacious columns in its papers
comparable to those of England. It would not at present pay in Paris;
the people are not so much interested.

Sport is the first interest; divorce second; and only third comes the
great coal strike which threatens a revolution in industrial life.
Fourth in interest come anti-waste crusades directed against an
unpopular Government. Then the Irish trouble, and after that probably
European affairs.

"They're writing so much about sport just to keep people's minds off
the coal strike and more serious matters," says a comfortably-minded
citizen. "The Government gives the papers a hint every day as to the
line to take."

The idea that the Government prompts the Press came with the war and
the efforts of the Press Bureau, and has come perhaps to stay.
Journalists have made great efforts since 1918 to regain for the
British Press that independence and freedom it had before the war.
Fleet Street has been hard hit, and the free-lancers who live outside
Fleet Street hit harder still. Not that the writing profession has
been beaten by the manipulators of public opinion. It is fighting hard
in London and will ultimately win.

But some one is responsible for a perversion of public interest at this
time, and for leading the mind of the nation away from the real poin