g else, nowadays? And how much better off are
they who never threw a stone in their lives than the rude mob who throw
them all the time?

Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from our books and
dropped from our speech. It has no longer use or meaning.

It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, or rather what can
be done, to secure to fastidious people some show and shadow of privacy in
their homes. The silly and vulgar passion of people for knowing all about
their neighbors' affairs, which is bad enough while it takes shape merely
in idle gossip of mouth, is something terrible when it is exalted into a
regular market demand of the community, and fed by a regular market supply
from all who wish to print what the community will read.

We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the buyer or the seller; we
think, on the whole, the buyer. But then he is again a seller; and so
there it is,--wheel within wheel, cog upon cog. And, since all these
sellers must earn their bread and butter, the more one searches for a fair
point of attacking the evil, the more he is perplexed.

The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his work, write what the man
who prints will buy. The man who prints must print what the people who
read will buy. Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest hands? Clearly, upon
the last buyer,--upon him who reads. But things have come to such a pass
already that to point out to the average American that it is vulgar and
also unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details about
his neighbors' business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to
the currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire and
strychnine upon mucous membranes. The diseased palate craves what has made
it diseased,--craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stomachs,
Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abuses
to a stand-still,--dyspepsia, and delirium-tremens, and so on.

But she takes no account, apparently, of the diseased conditions of brains
incident to the long use of unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food.
Perhaps she never anticipated this class of excesses. And, if there were
to be a precisely correlative punishment, it is to be feared it would fall
more heavily on the least guilty offender. It is not hard to fancy a poor
soul who, having been condemned to do reporters' duty for some years, and
having been forced to dwell and dilate up