of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one
moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest,
which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as
non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American
daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated
man--still less to a refined woman--as almost any one of the penny, or
some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which
I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the
same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.

We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and
diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States
the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas
in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by
themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in
its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated
class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain
halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the
people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing
themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated
class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the
tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that
they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they
assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which
belong not to him, but only to the educated class--that class which,
whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a
university or not, is saturated with the public school and university
traditions.

It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be
guided by the voice of authority--to follow its leaders--as the American
people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class,
trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in
that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.
The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.

That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were
goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able
to remember when the _Daily Telegraph_ created, by appealing to, a whole
new stratum of newspaper reader