ssian journalist fulfilled this function--the one assisted
by the prevalent "discipline of respect" for the bastinado, the other for
Siberia. Continuing, he said:

The chief function of an English journal is that of all other journals
the world over: it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon certain
things, and keep it diligently diverted from certain others. For
instance, it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon the glories
of England, a processional splendor stretching its receding line down the
hazy vistas of time, with the mellowed lights of a thousand years
glinting from its banners; and it must keep it diligently diverted from
the fact that all these glories were for the enrichment and
aggrandizement of the petted and privileged few, at cost of the blood and
sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses who achieved them but might
not enter in and partake of them. It must keep the public eye fixed in
loving and awful reverence upon the throne as a sacred thing, and
diligently divert it from the fact that no throne was ever set up by the
unhampered vote of a majority of any nation; and that hence no throne
exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any
flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and
crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only
business-wise--merely as retail differs from wholesale. It must keep the
citizen's eye fixed in reverent docility upon that curious invention of
machine politics, an Established Church, and upon that bald contradiction
of common justice, a hereditary nobility; and diligently divert it from
the fact that the one damns him if he doesn't wear its collar, and robs
him under the gentle name of taxation whether he wears it or not, and the
other gets all the honors while he does all the work.

The essayist thought that Mr. Arnold, with his trained eye and
intelligent observation, ought to have perceived that the very quality
which he so regretfully missed from our press--respectfulness, reverence
--was exactly the thing which would make our press useless to us if it
had it--rob it of the very thing which differentiates it from all other
journalism in the world and makes it distinctively and preciously
American, its frank and cheerful irreverence being by all odds the most
valuable of all its qualities. "For its mission--overlooked by Mr.
Arnold--is to stand guard over a nation's liberties, n