468 Viscount Burnham [Jan. 27, 



poor and attenuated compared with our own capacity even in these 



days. Speeches in Congress are but rarely given, although the 



members have the right of free printing and circulation in their own 



congressional areas. This right does not apply to platform speeches. 



Stenography is much less practised there than here, and the staudards 



of speed and correctness are undoubtedly lower, so that there more 



than here public men suffer from the misrepresentation that is bound 



to occur when an oration is compressed into " a stick," to use a 



compositor's phrase, or when a sentence is wrenched from its 



context. The American papers have never been so political as 



ours, and they have continued to greater excess the absorbing 



interest in crime aud criminal stories, which was more marked in 



our papers a hundred years ago, in proportion to other news, than 



it is now. Generally speaking, each newspaper in the United 



States has a whole staff of reporters doing regular rounds of the 



police stations, or acting as " fixed points " at the central police 



court, and each furnishes its own detectives to take up and track 



down every notable crime. Just as our papers had it a hundred years 



ago, so they still have an intensely personal note in all their interests, 



political, social and literary, and personal news is even more 



" featured," to use a journalistic term, in their pages than is the 



case here even now when we also revel in personal gossip. News 



stories and editorial comment are all cut and measured to standard. 



The leading article, the cabled despatch, and the special report are, 



as a rule, of fixed and universal length, aud each variety has its 



appropriate quota of headlines. There is no branch of American 



industry which is more machine-made than its newspapers. Their 



great merit is the smartness of their news service and the quickness 



of its grasp on the events and interests of the passing show of the 



world's panorama, as they see it, and of its " clinch " on the public 



mind of their own section of the great Republic. Because the 



American Press is given to "stunts" and sensations it must not be 



imagined that it is devoid of serious features ; on the contrary, 



interleaved with sections for children about Bubble and Squeak, and 



Mutt and Jeff, which are syndicated over the ^hole continent, you 



will find articles on Egyptian archaeology or the occult science of 



Mendelism in cattle breeding written up with a greater display of 



learning and technology than could be published in any paper of 



general circulation in this country. The up-to-dateness of the 



American Press is due to this electricity of its news service. It is 



not only " an intelligent anticipation of events before they occur," 



to use Lord Curzon's famous aphorism — although that also is almost 



American — it is what amounts to instantaneous publication. 



" Momentariness " has become an ideal of the Press, or shall I say 



the " stop-press," in every country, and that has come from American 



initiative. From America, too, has come the prevalent belief in 



the Press as the natural, nay, more, the inevitable instrument of 



