way) should be
permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the
present Kaiser "has all the gifts except one, that of politics," marks
a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able,
single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of
decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored,
proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain
leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as
lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very
daring performance.

There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly
and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a
whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence
in either society or politics of the press in America and in England.
As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater
number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In
America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769
monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total
to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of
10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of
5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a
monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an
unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands,
untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely
blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious
value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange
variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental
dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the
times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the
social and political dance.

To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published
in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France:
or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700
in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900
in France.

That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as
was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a
newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or
into high office in the colonies; that th