nly
host and the general tone of the sheet served up with the matutinal
hot cakes, or read by him on the cars and at the club.

Various causes may be suggested for this state of affairs. For one
thing, the mass of half-educated people in the United States--people
intelligent enough to take a lively interest in all that pertains to
humanity, but not trained enough to insist on literary _form_--is so
immense as practically to swamp the cultivated class and render it a
comparatively unimportant object for the business-like editor. In
England a standard of taste has been gradually evolved, which is
insisted on by the educated class and largely taken on authority by
others. In America practically no such standard is recognised; no one
there would continue to take in a paper he found dull because the
squire and the parson subscribed for it. The American reader--even
when himself of high education and refinement--is a much less
responsible being than the Englishman, and will content himself with a
shrug of his shoulders where the latter would write a letter of
indignant protest to the editor. I have more than once asked an
American friend how he could endure such a daily repast of pointless
vulgarity, slipshod English, and general second-rateness; but elicited
no better answer than that one had to see the news, that the
editorial part of the paper was well done, and that a man had to make
the best of what existed. This is a national trait; it has simply to
be recognised as such. Perhaps the fact that there is no metropolitan
press in America to give tone to the rest of the country may also
count for something in this connection. The press of Washington, the
political capital, is distinctly provincial; and the New York papers,
though practically representative of the United States for the outside
world, can hardly be said to play a genuinely metropolitan role within
the country itself.

The principal characteristics of American journalism may be summed up
in the word "enterprise." No one on earth is more fertile in
expedients than an American editor, kept constantly to the collar by a
sense of competing energies all around him. No trouble, or expense, or
contrivance is spared in the collection of news; scarcely any item of
interest is overlooked by the army of alert reporters day and night in
the field. The old-world papers do not compete with those of the new
in the matter of _quantity_ of news. But just here comes in one of