, might have been averted by
bold foresight and prompt action--while the blockade was yet but
paper--is equally undeniable!

With this, as with most salient features of that
bitter--gallant--enduring struggle for life; with it, as in most
mundane retrospects--the saddest memories must ever cluster about the
"might have been!"

CHAPTER XXXII.

PRESS, LITERATURE AND ART.

However much of ability may have been engaged upon it, the press of the
South--up to the events just preceding the war--had scarcely been that
great lever which it had elsewhere become. It was rather a local
machine than a great engine for shaping and manufacturing public
opinion.

One main cause for this, perhaps, was the decentralization of the
South. Tracts of country surrounding it looked up only to their chief
city, and thence drew their information, and even their ideas on the
topics of the day. But there it ceased. The principal trade of the
South went directly to the North; and in return were received northern
manufactures, northern books and northern ideas. Northern newspapers
came to the South; and except for matters of local information, or
local policy, a large class of her readers drew their inspiration
chiefly from journals of New York--catholic in their scope as
unreliable in their principles.

These papers were far ahead of those of the South--except in very rare
instances--in their machinery for collecting news and gossip; for
making up a taking whole; and in the no less important knowledge of
manipulating their circulation and advertising patronage. The newspaper
system of the North had been reduced to a science. Its great object was
_to pay_; and to accomplish this it must force its circulation in
numbers and in radius, and must become the medium of communicating with
far distant points. Great competition--application of _il faut bien
vivre_--drove the drones from the field and only the real workers were
allowed to live.

In the South the case was entirely different. Even in the large cities,
newspapers were content with a local circulation; they had a
little-varying clientele which looked upon them as infallible; and
their object was to consider and digest ideas, rather than to
propagate, or manufacture them.

The deep and universal interest in questions immediately preceding the
war, somewhat changed in the scope of the southern press. People in all
sections had intense anxiety to know what others, in different
s