This is not, as you see, a description of your journal:  it is a description of only one portion of it.  It is a complex and wonderful creation.  Every morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less distorted and imperfect, but such a mirror as it never had held up to it before.  But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the name of news.  And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life.  A horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires.  We hear promptly of a landslide in Switzerland, but only very slowly of a political agitation that is changing the constitution of the republic.  It should be said, however, that the daily newspaper is not alone responsible for this:  it is what the age and the community where it is published make it.  So far as I have observed, the majority of the readers in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance at a column report of a debate in the English parliament which involves a radical change in the whole policy of England; and devours a page about the Chantilly races, while it ignores a paragraph concerning the suppression of the Jesuit schools.

Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.  The obvious remedy for this would be more intelligent direction in the collection of news, and more careful sifting and supervision of it when gathered.  It becomes every day more apparent to every manager that such discrimination is more necessary.  There is no limit to the various intelligence and gossip that our complex life offers—­no paper is big enough to contain it; no reader has time enough to read it.  And the journal must cease to be a sort of waste-basket at the end of a telegraph wire, into which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossip-monger can dump whatever he pleases.  We must get rid of the superstition that value is given to an unimportant “item” by sending it a thousand miles over a wire.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the American newspaper, especially of the country weekly, is its enormous development of local and neighborhood news.  It is of recent date.  Horace Greeley used to advise the country editors to give small space to the general news of the world, but to cultivate assiduously the home field, to glean every possible detail of private life in the circuit of the county, and print it.  The advice was shrewd for a metropolitan editor, and it was not without its profit to the country editor.  It was founded on a deep knowledge of human nature; namely, upon the fact that people read most eagerly