which will not have
the slightest permanent importance. The whole press of a
newspaper-reading country, like England or America, may be actively
engaged during the space of a week or a fortnight in discussing some
incident which everybody will have forgotten in six months; and besides
these sensational incidents, there are hundreds of less notorious ones,
often fictitious, inserted simply for the temporary amusement of the
reader. The greatest evil of newspapers, in their effect on the
intellectual life, is the enormous importance which they are obliged to
attach to mere novelty. From the intellectual point of view, it is of no
consequence whether a thought occurred twenty-two centuries ago to
Aristotle or yesterday evening to Mr. Charles Darwin, and it is one of
the distinctive marks of the truly intellectual to be able to take a
hearty interest in all truth, independently of the date of its
discovery. The emphasis given by newspapers to novelty exhibits things
in wrong relations, as the lantern shows you what is nearest at the cost
of making the general landscape appear darker by the contrast. Besides
this exhibition of things in wrong relations, there is a positive
distortion arising from the unscrupulousness of party, a distortion
which extends far beyond the limits of the empire.

An essay might be written on the distortion of English affairs in the
French press, or of French affairs in the English press, by writers who
are as strongly partisan in another country as in their own. "It is such
a grand thing," wrote an English Paris correspondent in 1870, "for
Adolphus Thiers, son of a poor laborer of Aix, and in early life a
simple journalist, to be at the head of the Government of France." This
is a fair specimen of the kind of false presentation which is so common
in party journalism. The newspaper from which I have quoted it was
strongly opposed to Thiers, being in fact one of the principal organs of
the English Bonapartists. It is not true that Thiers was the son of a
poor laborer of Aix. His father was a workman of Marseilles, his mother
belonging to a family in which neither wealth nor culture had been rare,
and his mother's relatives had him educated at the Lycee. The art of the
journalist in bringing together the two extremes of a career remarkable
for its steady ascent had for its object to produce the idea of
incongruity, of sudden and unsuitable elevation. Not only M. Thiers,
however, but every human bein