the
chief faults of the American journal, one of the besetting sins of the
American people,--their well-known love of "bigness," their tendency
to ask "How much?" rather than "Of what kind?" There is a lack of
discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by the American
press that cannot but disgust the refined and tutored palate. It is
only the boor who demands a savoury and a roast of equal bulk; it is
only the vulgarian who wishes as much of his paper occupied by brutal
prize-fights or vapid "personals" as by important political
information or literary criticism. There is undoubtedly a modicum of
truth in Matthew Arnold's sneer that American journals certainly
supply news enough--but it is the news of the servants' hall. It is as
if the helm were held rather by the active reporter than by the able
editor. It is said that while there are eight editors to one reporter
in Denmark, the proportion is exactly reversed in the United States.
The net of the ordinary American editor is at least as indiscriminating
as that of the German historiographer: every detail is swept in,
irrespective of its intrinsic value. The very end for which the
newspaper avowedly exists is often defeated by the impossibility of
finding out what is the important news of the day. The reporter prides
himself on being able to "write up" the most intrinsically
uninteresting and unimportant matter. The best American critics
themselves agree on this point. Mr. Howells writes: "There are too
many things brought together in which the reader can and should have
no interest. The thousand and one petty incidents of the various
casualties of life that are grouped together in newspaper columns are
profitless expenditure of money and energy."

The culminating point of this aimless congeries of reading matter,
good, bad, and indifferent, is attained in the Sunday editions of the
larger papers. Nothing comes amiss to their endless columns: scandal,
politics, crochet-patterns, bogus interviews, puerile hoaxes, highly
seasoned police reports, exaggerations of every kind, records of
miraculous cures, funny stories with comic cuts, society paragraphs,
gossip about foreign royalties, personalities of every description. In
fact, they form the very ragbag of journalism. An unreasonable pride
is taken in their very bulk--as if forty pages _per se_ were better
than one; as if the tons of garbage in the Sunday issue of the Gotham
_Gasometer_ outweighed in any valuab