as in times past,
for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important
events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The
reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently
desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as
well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and
interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the
great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place
in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions,
and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions
that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the _Daily
Telegraph_, the _Morning Post_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the
_Westminster Gazette_. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a
lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction
rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between
them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them
may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which
are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no
higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank
as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent
medicines. It has been well said that the _Daily Mail_ has achieved what
no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the
English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table
every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they
undergo.

Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs
argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and
assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance.
That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were
pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or
instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which
they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in
the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public
towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and
difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the
public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as
real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the
newsp