The culminating point of this aimless congeries of reading matter, good, bad, and indifferent, is attained in the Sunday editions of the larger papers.  Nothing comes amiss to their endless columns:  scandal, politics, crochet-patterns, bogus interviews, puerile hoaxes, highly seasoned police reports, exaggerations of every kind, records of miraculous cures, funny stories with comic cuts, society paragraphs, gossip about foreign royalties, personalities of every description.  In fact, they form the very ragbag of journalism.  An unreasonable pride is taken in their very bulk—­as if forty pages per se were better than one; as if the tons of garbage in the Sunday issue of the Gotham Gasometer outweighed in any valuable sense the ten or twelve small pages of the Parisian Temps.  Not but that there is a great deal of good matter in the Sunday papers. Wer vieles bringt wird manchem etwas bringen; and he who knows where to look for it will generally find some edible morsel in the hog-trough.  It has been claimed that the Sunday papers of America correspond with the cheaper English magazines; and doubtless there is some truth in the assertion.  The pretty little tale, the interesting note of popular science, or the able sketch of some contemporary political condition is, however, so hidden away amid a mass of feebly illustrated and vulgarly written notes on sport, society, criminal reports, and personal interviews with the most evanescent of celebrities that one cannot but stand aghast at this terrible misuse of the powerful engine of the press.  It is idle to contend that the newspaper, as a business undertaking, must supply this sort of thing to meet the demand for it.  It is (or ought to be) the proud boast of the press that it leads and moulds public opinion, and undoubtedly journalism (like the theatre) is at least as much the cause as the effect of the depravity of public taste.  Enterprising stage-managers have before now proved that Shakespeare does not spell ruin, and there are admirable journals in the United States which have shown themselves to be valuable properties without undue pandering to the frivolous or vicious side of the public instinct.[17]

A straw shows how the wind blows; let one item show the unfathomable gulf in questions of tone and taste that can subsist between a great American daily and its English counterparts.  In the summer of 1895 an issue of one of the richest and most influential of American journals—­a paper that such men as Mr. Cleveland and Mr. McKinley have to take account of—­published under the heading “A Fortunate Find” a picture of two girls in bathing dress, talking by the edge of the sea.  One says to the other:  “How did you manage your father?  I thought he wouldn’t let you come?” The answer is:  “I caught him kissing the typewriter.”  It is, of course, perfectly inconceivable that any reputable British daily could descend to this depth of purposeless and odious vulgarity.  If this