who think that the sole cause is corruption.
There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste
pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs,
petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris
Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their
species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern
journalism.

Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently:

Now there is much pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity
and ignorance--in the so-called free press; but it is the
pettiness, etc., common to the so-called human race--a
pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters, landlords, poets,
and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the usual
aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all
American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and
out, we quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American
newspapers to take things much more seriously than they
deserve. Does Miss Lowell read the ponderous news from
Washington? Does she read the society news? Does she, we
wonder, read the newspapers?

Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspapers take
things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as the mayor's
wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the war, especially,
editors have come to believe that their highest duty is not to report
but to instruct, not to print news but to save civilization, not to
publish what Benjamin Harris calls "the Circumstances of Publique
Affairs, both abroad and at home," but to keep the nation on the
straight and narrow path. Like the kings of England, they have elected
themselves Defenders of the Faith. "For five years," says Mr. Cobb of
the _New York World_, "there has been no free play of public opinion in
the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war, governments
conscripted public opinion. They goose-stepped it. They taught it to
stand at attention and salute. It sometimes seems that, after the
armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a vow that
they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They were willing
to die for their country but not willing to think for it." That
minority, which is proudly prepared to think for it, and not only
prepared but cocksure that it alone knows how to think for it, has
adopted the theory that the pub