upon a party
organization, a circle of interested persons, or a government. If the
leanings of the paper were distasteful to the readers, they ceased to
buy the paper. Their wishes thus remained, in the final analysis, the
determining factor for the contents of the newspapers.

The gradually expanding circulation of the printed newspapers
nevertheless soon led to their employment by the authorities for making
public announcements. With this came, in the first quarter of the last
century, the extension of private announcements, which have now
attained, through the so-called advertising bureaus, some such
organization as political news-collecting possesses in the
correspondence bureaus.

The modern newspaper is a capitalistic enterprise, a sort of
news-factory in which a great number of people (correspondents, editors,
typesetters, correctors, machine-tenders, collectors of advertisements,
office clerks, messengers, etc.) are employed on wage, under a single
administration, at very specialized work. This paper produces wares for
an unknown circle of readers, from whom it is, furthermore, frequently
separated by intermediaries, such as delivery agencies and postal
institutions. The simple needs of the reader or of the circle of patrons
no longer determine the quality of these wares; it is now the very
complicated conditions of competition in the publication market. In this
market, however, as generally in wholesale markets, the consumers of the
goods, the newspaper readers, take no direct part; the determining
factors are the wholesale dealers and the speculators in news: the
governments, the telegraph bureaus dependent upon their special
correspondents, the political parties, artistic and scientific cliques,
men on 'change, and, last but not least, the advertising agencies and
large individual advertisers.

Each number of a great journal which appears today is a marvel of
economic division of labor, capitalistic organization, and mechanical
technique; it is an instrument of intellectual and economic intercourse,
in which the potencies of all other instruments of commerce--the
railway, the post, the telegraph, and the telephone--are united as in a
focus.

D. IMITATION

1. Definition of Imitation[146]

The term "imitation" is used in ordinary language to designate any
repetition of any act or thought which has been noted by an observer.
Thus one imitates the facial expression of another, or his mode of
speech.