Perhaps a four-line sermon in a Saturday paper is
the sufficient German equivalent of the eight or ten
columns of sermons which the New-Yorkers get in their
Monday morning papers. The latest news (two days
old) follows the four-line sermon, under the pica
headline “Telegrams”—these
are “telegraphed” with a pair of scissors
out of the
Augsburger ZEITUNG of the day before.
These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds
lines from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and
two and five-eights lines from Calcutta. Thirty-three
small-pica lines news in a daily journal in a King’s
Capital of one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants
is surely not an overdose. Next we have the pica
heading, “News of the Day,” under which
the following facts are set forth: Prince Leopold
is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Arnulph
is coming back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag
will meet at ten o’clock in the morning and
consider an election law, three lines and one word
over; a city government item, five and one-half lines;
prices of tickets to the proposed grand Charity Ball,
twenty-three lines—for this one item occupies
almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there
is to be a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main,
with an orchestra of one hundred and eight instruments,
seven and one-half lines. That concludes the
first page. Eighty-five lines, altogether, on
that page, including three headlines. About
fifty of those lines, as one perceives, deal with
local matters; so the reporters are not overworked.
Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with
an opera criticism, fifty-three lines (three of them
being headlines), and “Death Notices,”
ten lines.
The other half of the second page is made up of two
paragraphs under the head of “Miscellaneous News.”
One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between
the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one
and a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious
destruction of a peasant child by its parents, forty
lines, or one-fifth of the total of the reading-matter
contained in the paper.
Consider what a fifth part of the reading-matter of
an American daily paper issued in a city of one hundred
and seventy thousand inhabitants amounts to!
Think what a mass it is. Would any one suppose
I could so snugly tuck away such a mass in a chapter
of this book that it would be difficult to find it
again in the reader lost his place? Surely not.
I will translate that child-murder word for word,
to give the reader a realizing sense of what a fifth
part of the reading-matter of a Munich daily actually
is when it comes under measurement of the eye: