repast of pointless vulgarity, slipshod English, and general second-rateness; but elicited no better answer than that one had to see the news, that the editorial part of the paper was well done, and that a man had to make the best of what existed.  This is a national trait; it has simply to be recognised as such.  Perhaps the fact that there is no metropolitan press in America to give tone to the rest of the country may also count for something in this connection.  The press of Washington, the political capital, is distinctly provincial; and the New York papers, though practically representative of the United States for the outside world, can hardly be said to play a genuinely metropolitan role within the country itself.

The principal characteristics of American journalism may be summed up in the word “enterprise.”  No one on earth is more fertile in expedients than an American editor, kept constantly to the collar by a sense of competing energies all around him.  No trouble, or expense, or contrivance is spared in the collection of news; scarcely any item of interest is overlooked by the army of alert reporters day and night in the field.  The old-world papers do not compete with those of the new in the matter of quantity of news.  But just here comes in one of the chief faults of the American journal, one of the besetting sins of the American people,—­their well-known love of “bigness,” their tendency to ask “How much?” rather than “Of what kind?” There is a lack of discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by the American press that cannot but disgust the refined and tutored palate.  It is only the boor who demands a savoury and a roast of equal bulk; it is only the vulgarian who wishes as much of his paper occupied by brutal prize-fights or vapid “personals” as by important political information or literary criticism.  There is undoubtedly a modicum of truth in Matthew Arnold’s sneer that American journals certainly supply news enough—­but it is the news of the servants’ hall.  It is as if the helm were held rather by the active reporter than by the able editor.  It is said that while there are eight editors to one reporter in Denmark, the proportion is exactly reversed in the United States.  The net of the ordinary American editor is at least as indiscriminating as that of the German historiographer:  every detail is swept in, irrespective of its intrinsic value.  The very end for which the newspaper avowedly exists is often defeated by the impossibility of finding out what is the important news of the day.  The reporter prides himself on being able to “write up” the most intrinsically uninteresting and unimportant matter.  The best American critics themselves agree on this point.  Mr. Howells writes:  “There are too many things brought together in which the reader can and should have no interest.  The thousand and one petty incidents of the various casualties of life that are grouped together in newspaper columns are profitless expenditure of money and energy.”