Americans read nothing except the paper.  If they read that thoroughly, they have time for nothing else.  What is its reader to do when his journal thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in a fair-sized duodecimo volume, and on Sundays the amount of two of them?  Granted that this miscellaneous hodge-podge is the cream of current literature, is it profitable to the reader?  Is it a means of anything but superficial culture and fragmentary information?  Besides, it stimulates an unnatural appetite, a liking for the striking, the brilliant, the sensational only; for our selections from current literature are, usually the “plums”; and plums are not a wholesome-diet for anybody.  A person accustomed to this finds it difficult to sit down patiently to the mastery of a book or a subject, to the study of history, the perusal of extended biography, or to acquire that intellectual development and strength which comes from thorough reading and reflection.

The subject has another aspect.  Nobody chooses his own reading; and a whole community perusing substantially the same material tends to a mental uniformity.  The editor has the more than royal power of selecting the intellectual food of a large public.  It is a responsibility infinitely greater than that of the compiler of schoolbooks, great as that is.  The taste of the editor, or of some assistant who uses the scissors, is in a manner forced upon thousands of people, who see little other printed matter than that which he gives them.  Suppose his taste runs to murders and abnormal crimes, and to the sensational in literature:  what will be the moral effect upon a community of reading this year after year?

If this excess of daily miscellany is deleterious to the public, I doubt if it will be, in the long run, profitable to the newspaper, which has a field broad enough in reporting and commenting upon the movement of the world, without attempting to absorb the whole reading field.

I should like to say a word, if time permitted, upon the form of the journal, and about advertisements.  I look to see advertisements shorter, printed with less display, and more numerous.  In addition to the use now made of the newspaper by the classes called “advertisers,” I expect it to become the handy medium of the entire public, the means of ready communication in regard to all wants and exchanges.

Several years ago, the attention of the publishers of American newspapers was called to the convenient form of certain daily journals in South Germany, which were made up in small pages, the number of which varied from day to day, according to the pressure of news or of advertisements.  The suggestion as to form has been adopted bit many of our religious, literary, and special weeklies, to the great convenience of the readers, and I doubt not of the publishers also.  Nothing is more unwieldy than our big blanket-sheets:  they are awkward to handle, inconvenient to read, unhandy to bind and preserve.  It is difficult