ournalism, it is needless to say, is
extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The
extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news
columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the
circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think
it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely
the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in
cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The
journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining
in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are,
for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate.
They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.

The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and
journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of
"exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and
corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short
stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this
characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature
that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some
one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some
one has been called a liar by the President of the United States.

For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a
convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a
democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then
comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have
other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and
Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly
favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who
enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life
was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the
eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish
blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal
of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of
meditation in the Indian himself.

One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the
"commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be
inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated und