Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water.
Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald
hired by the Eolithic tribe to cry the news of the
coming day along the caves, preceded the chosen Tribal
Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe,
so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism
meets the first tribal need after warmth, food, and
women.
In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent
from the Tribal Herald. A tribe thinly occupying
large spaces feels lonely. It desires to hear
the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly;
to comfort itself with the knowledge that there are
companions just below the horizon. It employs,
therefore, heralds to name and describe all who pass.
That is why newspapers of new countries seem often
so outrageously personal. The tribe, moreover,
needs quick and sure knowledge of everything that
touches on its daily life in the big spaces—earth,
air, and water news which the Older Peoples have put
behind them. That is why its newspapers so often
seem so laboriously trivial.
For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete
O’Halloran, comes in thirty miles to have his
horse shod, and incidentally smashes the king-bolt
of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The
Tribal Herald—a thin weekly, with a patent
inside—connects the red nose and the breakdown
with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy
libel. But the Tribal Herald understands that
two-and-seventy families of the tribe may use that
road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether
the accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete
protests, to the neglected state of the road.
Fifteen men happen to know that Pete’s nose
is an affliction, not an indication. One of them
loafs across and explains to the Tribal Herald, who,
next week, cries aloud that the road ought to be mended.
Meantime Pete, warmed to the marrow at having focussed
the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires
thirty miles up-stage, pursued by advertisements of
buckboards guaranteed not to break their king-bolts,
and later (which is what the tribe were after all
the time) some tribal authority or other mends the
road.
This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little
attention you can see the tribal instinct of self-preservation
quite logically underrunning all sorts of queer modern
developments.
As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon
from edge to unbroken edge, their desire to know all
about the next man weakens a little—but
not much. Outside the cities are still the long
distances, the ‘vast, unoccupied areas’
of the advertisements; and the men who come and go
yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of
old to their lodges. A man stepping out of the
dark into the circle of the fires naturally, if he
be a true man, holds up his hands and says, ’I,
