ket. The latest thoughts that thinkers
have, the trend of the thoughts they are going to have--the public makes
demand for these. It gets them. Then it cries 'More! More!' Where is the
writer who does not think with the printing-press hot upon his track,
and the sound of the pulp-mill making paper for his poems, and the buzz
of editors, instead of the music of the spheres? Think of the
destruction to American forests, the bare and glaring hills that face us
day and night, all for a literature like this--thousands of square miles
of it, spread before our faces, morning after morning, week after week,
through all this broad and glorious land! Seventy million
souls--brothers of yours and mine--walking through prairies of pictures
Sunday after Sunday, flickered at by head-lines, deceived by adjectives,
each with his long day's work, column after column, sentence after
sentence, plodding--plodding--plodding down to ----. My geography may be
wrong; the general direction is right."

"But don't you believe in newspapers?"

"Why, yes, in the abstract; _news_papers. But we do not have any news
nowadays. It is not news to know a thing before it's happened, nor is it
news to know what might happen, or why it might happen, or why it might
not happen. To be told that it doesn't make any difference whether it
happens at all, would be news, perhaps, to many people--such news as
there is; but it is hardly worth while to pay three cents to be sure of
that. An intelligent man can be sure of it for nothing. He has been sure
of it every morning for years. It's the gist of most of the newspapers
he reads. From the point of view of what can be called truly vital
information, in any larger sense, the only news a daily paper has is the
date at the top of the page. If a man once makes sure of that, if he
feels from the bottom of his heart what really good news it is that one
more day is come in a world as beautiful as this,--the rest of it----"

P. G. S. of M.: "But----"

"The rest of it, if it's true, is hardly worth knowing; and if it's
worth knowing, it can be found better in books; and if it's not
true--'Every man his own liar' is my motto. He might as well have the
pleasure of it, and he knows how much to believe. The same lunging,
garrulous, blindly busy habit is the law of all we do. Take our literary
critical journals. If a critic can not tell what he sees at once, he
must tell what he fails to see at once. The point is not his seeing