Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water.

NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY

Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithic tribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded the chosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe, so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets the first tribal need after warmth, food, and women.

In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the Tribal Herald.  A tribe thinly occupying large spaces feels lonely.  It desires to hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort itself with the knowledge that there are companions just below the horizon.  It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all who pass.  That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageously personal.  The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge of everything that touches on its daily life in the big spaces—­earth, air, and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them.  That is why its newspapers so often seem so laboriously trivial.

For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O’Halloran, comes in thirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes the king-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road.  The Tribal Herald—­a thin weekly, with a patent inside—­connects the red nose and the breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel.  But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of the tribe may use that road weekly.  It concerns them to discover whether the accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to the neglected state of the road.  Fifteen men happen to know that Pete’s nose is an affliction, not an indication.  One of them loafs across and explains to the Tribal Herald, who, next week, cries aloud that the road ought to be mended.  Meantime Pete, warmed to the marrow at having focussed the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires thirty miles up-stage, pursued by advertisements of buckboards guaranteed not to break their king-bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were after all the time) some tribal authority or other mends the road.

This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little attention you can see the tribal instinct of self-preservation quite logically underrunning all sorts of queer modern developments.

As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon from edge to unbroken edge, their desire to know all about the next man weakens a little—­but not much.  Outside the cities are still the long distances, the ‘vast, unoccupied areas’ of the advertisements; and the men who come and go yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of old to their lodges.  A man stepping out of the dark into the circle of the fires naturally, if he be a true man, holds up his hands and says, ’I,