ly with the American
pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of
highway-robber in print.

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of
interviewers, because I really think they are made to bear too much of
the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. But I am very
far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very
bad. So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in a real sense
rather magnify it. I would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger
and more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor
journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like
dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. What is wrong
with the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole
disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to
the cinema and then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism is
not in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the lower level of
the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; or
rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even to
belong to it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, as the
trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without involving a vilification of
all the people who grow wheat. It is the American plutocracy and not the
American press. What is the matter with the modern world is not modern
headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What is the matter with
the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from
another.

_Some American Cities_

There is one point, almost to be called a paradox, to be noted about New
York; and that is that in one sense it is really new. The term very
seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New Forest is nearly as old
as the Conquest, and the New Theology is nearly as old as the Creed.
Things have been offered to me as the new thought that might more
properly be called the old thoughtlessness; and the thing we call the
New Poor Law is already old enough to know better. But there is a sense
in which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always being
renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the
citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that
they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope.
At first I had a fancy that they never quite finished p