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please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the
idle nine days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may essay,
however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to
deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the
dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds
of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these
branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which
goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of
a nation's reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies
the total of the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, taken
together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good
man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but
the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the
average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of
the American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightly
readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they
touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand;
they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds,
in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull
people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the
rare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the
cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the
antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have
spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much
baser, but so much more readable, than the English; their evil is
done more effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the
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