g starts from a very small beginning, since
every man begins life as a baby. It is a great rise for one baby to the
Presidency of the French Republic; it was also a great rise for other
babies who have attained the premiership of England. The question is,
not what Thiers may have been seventy years ago, but what he was
immediately before his acceptance of the highest office of the State. He
was the most trusted and the most experienced citizen, so that the last
step in his career was as natural as the elevation of Reynolds to the
presidency of the Academy.

It is difficult for any one who cares for justice to read party journals
without frequent irritation, and it does not signify which side the
newspaper takes. Men are so unfair in controversy that we best preserve
the serenity of the intellect by studiously avoiding all literature that
has a controversial tone. By your new rule of abstinence from newspapers
you will no doubt gain almost as much in serenity as in time. To the
ordinary newspaper reader there is little loss of serenity, because he
reads only the newspaper that he agrees with, and however unfair it is,
he is pleased by its unfairness. But the highest and best culture makes
us disapprove of unfairness on our own side of the question also. We are
pained by it; we feel humiliated by it; we lament its persistence and
its perversity.

I have said nearly all that has to be said in favor of your rule of
abstinence. I have granted that the newspapers cost us much time, which,
if employed for great intellectual purposes, would carry us very far;
that they give disproportionate views of things by the emphasis they
give to novelty, and false views by the unfairness which belongs to
party. I might have added that newspaper writers give such a
preponderance to politics--not political philosophy, but to the everyday
work of politicians--that intellectual culture is thrown into the
background, and the election of a single member of Parliament is made to
seem of greater national importance than the birth of a powerful idea.
And yet, notwithstanding all these considerations, which are serious
indeed for the intellectual, I believe that your resolution is unwise,
and that you will find it to be untenable. One momentous reason more
than counterbalances all these considerations put together. Newspapers
are to the whole civilized world what the daily house-talk is to the
members of a household; they keep up our daily interes