the
worst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle;
that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries
with it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is generally very
reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And even those to whom talking
to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth out
may still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities of
American dentistry.

Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of
the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the
articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that
distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen
in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And the
headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic
locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging
himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can
safely be let loose to wander about the town.

For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists
immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labour
troubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and
perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great
truth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itself
a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was
breaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries could
last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could
hardly even live, and were already dying.

All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly and
most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it
casually and idly spoken. But on the top of this column of political
philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters,
'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike.' This was inaccurate. When I
spoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but I
did not know what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct
idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying
things about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from the
beneficent activities. Any one who did not happen to be a journalist, or
know a little about journalism, American and English, would have
supposed that the same m