ute, in each of these branches, to
build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name
of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in
these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of the nation's
speech; and the speech and reading, taken together, form the efficient
educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some
little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is
all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The
copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian
_chroniqueur_, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable
influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the
same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and
unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some
pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter
overwhelms the rarer utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish,
and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the
antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have spoken
of the American and the French, not because they are so much baser, but
so much more readable, than the English; their evil is done more
effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the few that care
to read; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily
neglected, truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects
daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an
important officer; yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he does;
judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the
reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece
of news for the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no
discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so
open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things that we profess
to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece
of education will be crowned with any great success, so long as some of
us practise and the rest openly approve of public falsehood.

There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the business
of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. In
every department of literature, though so low as hardly to deserve the
name, truth to the fact is of importance to