ives. When one stops to consider what these lives are--most of
them--there can be but one conclusion about the reading of the people
who have to live them, and that is that while sensational reading may be
an evil, as compared with the evil that has made it necessary, it is an
immeasurable blessing.

The most important literary and artistic fact of the nineteenth century
is the subdivision of labour--that is, the subdividing of every man's
life and telling him he must only be alive in a part of it. In
proportion as an age takes sensations out of men's lives it is obliged
to put them into their literature. Men are used to sensations on the
earth as long as they stay on it and they are bound to have them in one
way or another. An age which narrows the actual lives of men, which so
adjusts the labour of the world that nearly every man in it not only
works with a machine, spiritual or otherwise, but is a machine himself,
and a small part of a machine, must not find fault with its art for
being full of hysterics and excitement, or with its newspapers for being
sensational. Instead of finding fault it has every reason to be
grateful--to thank a most merciful Heaven that the men in the world are
still alive enough in it to be capable of feeling sensation in other
men's lives, though they have ceased to be capable of having sensations
in their own, or of feeling sensations if they had them. It was when the
herds of her people were buried in routine and peace that Rome had
bull-fights. New York, with its hordes of drudges, ledger-slaves,
machinists, and clerks, has the New York _World_. It lasts longer than a
bull-fight and it can be had every morning before a man starts off to be
a machine and every evening when he gets back from being a machine--for
one cent. On Sunday a whole Colosseum fronts him and he is glutted with
gore from morning until night. To a man who is a penholder by the week,
or a linotype machine, or a ratchet in a factory, a fight is infinite
peace. Obedience to the command of Scripture, making the Sabbath a day
of rest, is entirely relative. Some of us are rested by taking our
under-interested lives to a Sunday paper, and others are rested by
taking our over-interested lives to church. Men read dime novels in
proportion as their lives are staid and mechanical. Men whose lives are
their own dime novels are bored by printed ones. Men whose years are
crowded with crises, culminations, and events, who run the most