There is an editorial tradition—­it might almost be termed a superstition—­which I think will have to be abandoned.  It is that a certain space in the journal must be filled with editorial, and that some of the editorials must be long, without any reference to the news or the necessity of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at the moment to fill the space with original matter that is readable.  There is the sacred space, and it must be filled.  The London journals are perfect types of this custom.  The result is often a wearisome page of words and rhetoric.  It may be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much of it.  The necessity of filling this space causes the writer, instead of stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made perspicuous and telling, to beat it out thin, and make it cover as much ground as possible.  This, also, is vanity.  In the economy of room, which our journals will more and more be compelled to cultivate, I venture to say that this tradition will be set aside.  I think that we may fairly claim a superiority in our journals over the English dailies in our habit of making brief, pointed editorial paragraphs.  They are the life of the editorial page.  A cultivation of these until they are as finished and pregnant as the paragraphs of “The London Spectator” and “The New-York Nation,” the printing of long editorials only when the elucidation of a subject demands length, and the use of the space thus saved for more interesting reading, is probably the line of our editorial evolution.

To continue the comparison of our journals as a class, with the English as a class, ours are more lively, also more flippant, and less restrained by a sense of responsibility or by the laws of libel.  We furnish, now and again, as good editorial writing for its purpose; but it commonly lacks the dignity, the thoroughness, the wide sweep and knowledge, that characterizes the best English discussion of political and social topics.

The third department of the newspaper is that of miscellaneous reading-matter.  Whether this is the survival of the period when the paper contained little else except “selections,” and other printed matter was scarce, or whether it is only the beginning of a development that shall supply the public nearly all its literature, I do not know.  Far as our newspapers have already gone in this direction, I am inclined to think that in their evolution they must drop this adjunct, and print simply the news of the day.  Some of the leading journals of the world already do this.

In America I am sure the papers are printing too much miscellaneous reading.  The perusal of this smattering of everything, these scraps of information and snatches of literature, this infinite variety and medley, in which no subject is adequately treated, is distracting and debilitating to the mind.  It prevents the reading of anything in full, and its satisfactory assimilation.  It is said that the majority of