1922] on Journalism 469 



democracy in the English sense of the word. The continental 

 character of the United States and its methods of popular govern- 

 ment never invested Congress, still less the State Legislatures, with 

 the importance and authority of the British Parliament. Legisla- 

 tive work is mainly in the hands of committees sitting for the most 

 part in private, whilst the executive government works in shadow 

 behind the colossal figure of the President. For most of the pur- 

 poses of national life it is the newspaper press that embodies and 

 expresses the public opinion, which is always said to rule America 

 more absolutely than it does any other part of the world. If a- 

 grievance is to be presented or a scandal to be investigated it is 

 almost always the Press that forces its way into the court-house or 

 the city hall. The exposure of the Tweed ring in the municipal 

 government of New York City and of the shipping orgy of waste in 

 the American dockyards during the Great War are cases in point, 

 one drawn from the last century and the other from the present. 

 As it has been in America, so it is likely to be here, although not 

 quite to the same extent or for the same reasons. It would, how- 

 ever, be a serious loss if no British newspapers were able to publish 

 adequate and elaborate reports of the debates of both Houses of 

 Parliament and of the great public bodies of the country. If it be 

 true that the public life of the country be lived to-day on a lower 

 plane of public estimation, it will only hurry on the process of 

 degradation to exclude trustworthy reports, because it would still 

 further conceal, as in the old days of Parliamentary privilege, what 

 was corrupt and inefficient, and withhold from public knowledge 

 and appreciation all that was sane and sound, in a double sense " of 

 good report " among men. 



Akin to the prevalence of "snippets" is the predominance of 

 headlines. In this matter of ; ' captions " we have taken our pattern 

 from the United States, and, as in most of the industrial processes of 

 America, everything in journalism is more or less standardised in the 

 form and quality of the news-sheet. The very length of the para- 

 graphs and the number of the headlines has a curious uniformity, 

 which to my mind is very impressive, for it is not only a powerful 

 stimulant to national solidarity in the " viewpoint," as they call it, of 

 the world's affairs, but a sure proof that in the Union this already 

 exists in fact and in truth. TTe have no such identity of make-up, 

 but there is a strong movement that way in our cheap press. If the 

 common run of busy people are apt to take their news from the 

 headline, it becomes a shorter cut to intelligence than the para-: 

 graph, and there again the matter of selection develops into a fine 

 art of infinite possibilities. " It makes all the difference in the 

 world," said the English philosopher, " whether you put the truth in 

 the first or second place." In newspapers it makes all the difference 

 in the world whether you put the truth in big type or iu small, in fat 

 type or in thin, in " caps " or in " ruby." This argument applies for 



