t in each other,
they save us from the evils of isolation. To live as a member of the
great white race of men, the race that has filled Europe and America,
and colonized or conquered whatever other territories it has been
pleased to occupy, to share from day to day its cares, its thoughts, its
aspirations, it is necessary that every man should read his daily
newspaper. Why are the French peasants so bewildered and at sea, so out
of place in the modern world? It is because they never read a newspaper.
And why are the inhabitants of the United States, though scattered over
a territory fourteen times the area of France, so much more capable of
concerted political action, so much more _alive_ and modern, so much
more interested in new discoveries of all kinds and capable of selecting
and utilizing the best of them? It is because the newspaper penetrates
everywhere; and even the lonely dweller on the prairie or in the forest
is not intellectually isolated from the great currents of public life
which flow through the telegraph and the press.

The experiment of doing without newspapers has been tried by a whole
class, the French peasantry, with the consequences that we know, and it
has also from time to time been tried by single individuals belonging to
more enlightened sections of society. Let us take one instance, and let
us note what appear to have been the effects of this abstinence. Auguste
Comte abstained from newspapers as a teetotaller abstains from
spirituous liquors. Now, Auguste Comte possessed a gift of nature which,
though common in minor degrees, is in the degree in which he possessed
it rarer than enormous diamonds. That gift was the power of dealing with
abstract intellectual conceptions, and living amidst them always, as the
practical mind lives in and deals with material things. And it happened
in Comte's case, as it usually does happen in cases of very peculiar
endowment, that the gift was accompanied by the instincts necessary to
its perfect development and to its preservation. Comte instinctively
avoided the conversation of ordinary people, because he felt it to be
injurious to the perfect exercise of his faculty, and for the same
reason he would not read newspapers. In imposing upon himself these
privations he acted like a very eminent living etcher, who, having the
gift of an extraordinary delicacy of hand, preserves it by abstinence
from everything that may effect the steadiness of the nerves. There is a