s. The same thing has been done again
more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately
near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes,
of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the
lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to
be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people
from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as
unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that
one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them--their
intellectuality and culture--with one hundred members of the London
university clubs.

Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit--that
spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal
in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled
and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in
any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England
generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America
but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.

The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for
those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in
the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of
events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time
when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition
and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes
(as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great
body of the English press will have followed the course of the American
publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the
tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people
as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would
be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy
that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or
more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.

And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable
inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of
American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from
a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great
Britain produces no magazin