h less clearly defined in the United States
than in England. The English reporter, as a rule, confines himself
strictly to his report, which is made without bias. A Conservative
speech is as accurately (though perhaps not as lengthily) reported in
a Liberal paper as in one of its own colour. All comment or criticism
is reserved for the editorial columns. This is by no means the case in
America. Such an authority as the _Atlantic Monthly_ admits that
wilful distortion is not infrequent: the reporter seems to consider it
as part of his duty to amend the record in the interest of his own
paper or party. The American reporter, in a word, may be more
active-minded, more original, more amusing, than his English
colleague; but he is seldom so accurate. This want of impartiality is
another of the patent defects of the American daily press. It is a too
unscrupulous partisan; it represents the ethics of the ward politician
rather than the seeker after truth.

If restraint be a sign of power, then the American press is weak
indeed. There is no reticence about it. Nothing is sacred to an
American reporter; everything that can be in any sense regarded as an
item of news is exposed to the full glare of publicity. It has come to
be so widely taken for granted that one likes to see his name in the
papers, that it is often difficult to make a lady or gentleman of the
American press understand that you really prefer to have your family
affairs left in the dusk of private life. The touching little story
entitled "A Thanksgiving Breakfast," in _Harper's Magazine_ for
November, 1895, records an experience that is almost a commonplace
except as regards the unusually thin skin of the victim and the
unusual delicacy and good feeling of the operator. The writer of an
interesting article in the _Outlook_ (April 25, 1896), an admirable
weekly paper published in New York, sums it up in a sentence: "It is
no exaggeration to say that the wanton and unrestricted invasion of
privacy by the modern press constitutes in certain respects the most
offensive form of tyranny which the world has ever known." The writer
then narrates the following incident to illustrate the length to which
this invasion of domestic privacy is carried:

A cultivated and refined woman living in a boarding-house was so
unfortunate as to awaken the admiration of a young man of
unbalanced mind who was living under the same roof. He paid her
attentions which we