with the best-mannered men of the
time. It is, of course, highly honourable to American society and to
themselves that they have and take the opportunity of advancement, but
the fact remains patent in their slipshod style and the faulty grammar
of their writings, and in their vulgar familiarity of manner. It has
been asserted that journalism in America is not a profession, and is
"subject to none of the conditions that would entitle it to the name.
There are no recognised rules of conduct for its members, and no
tribunal to enforce them if there were."

The startling contrasts in America which suggested the title of the
present volume are, of course, well in evidence in the American press.
Not only are there many papers which are eminently unobnoxious to the
charges brought against the American press generally, but different
parts of the same paper often seem as if they were products of totally
different spheres (or, at any rate, hemispheres). The "editorials," or
leaders, are sometimes couched in a form of which the scholarly
restraint, chasteness of style, moral dignity, and intellectual force
would do honour to the best possible of papers in the best possible of
worlds, while several columns on the front page of the same issue are
occupied by an illustrated account of a prize-fight, in which the most
pointless and disgusting slang, such as "tapping his claret" and
"bunging his peepers," is used with blood-curdling frequency.

In a paper that lies before me as I write, something like a dozen
columns are devoted to a detailed account of the great contest between
John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett (Sept. 7, 1892), while the principal
place on the editorial page (but only _one_ column) is occupied by a
well-written and most appreciative article on the Quaker poet
Whittier, who had gone to his long home just about the time the
pugilists were battering each other at New Orleans.[19]

It would give a false impression of American journalism as a whole if
we left the question here. While American newspapers certainly
exemplify many of the worst sides of democracy and much of the rawness
of a new country, it would be folly to deny that they also participate
in the attendant virtues of both the one and the other. The same
inspiring sense of largeness and freedom that we meet in other
American institutions is also represented in the press: the same
absence of slavish deference to effete authority, the same openness of
opportun