l; that, barring such
qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools
to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a
matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as
do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools
secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given
in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes
co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a
higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of
reading in the people.

And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as
well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to
make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of
holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of
divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must
be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.

* * * * *

The charming English writer, the author of _Sinners and Saints_,
affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago,
to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.
"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many
English still of the same opinion.

The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and
by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged
by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial
observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of
America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's
comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few
statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers
"an awful symptom"--"the worst features in the life of the United
States." Americans also--the best Americans--have a great dislike of the
London papers.

The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the
American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the
Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed--the
loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to
these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he
will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains,
a large amount