The business of the press, then, at this present crisis, is to keep the cause for which we are fighting clearly before us, and this it has done well; also, because we do not fight best in blinders, to tell us all that can be known of the facts of the situation, and this it has done not so well.

The power of the newspapers is that most people read them, and that many people read nothing else.  Their weakness is that they have to sell or cease to be, so that by a natural instinct of self-preservation they fall back on the two sure methods whereby you can always capture the attention of the public.  Any man who is trying to say what he thinks, making full allowance for all doubts and differences, runs the risk of losing his audience.  He can regain their attention by flattering them or by frightening them.  Flattery and fright, the one following the other from day to day, and often from paragraph to paragraph, is a very large part of the newspaper reader’s diet.  If he is a sane and busy man, he is not too much impressed by either.  He is not mercurial enough for the quick changes of an orator’s or journalist’s fancy, whereby he is called on, one day, to dig the German warships like rats out of their harbour, and, not many days later, to spend his last shilling on the purchase of the last bullet to shoot at the German invader.  He knows that this is such stuff as dreams are made of.  He knows also that the orator or journalist, after calling on him for these achievements, goes home to dinner.  No great harm is done, just as no great harm is done by bad novels.  But an opportunity is lost; the press and the platform might do more than they do to strengthen us and inform us, and help forward our cause.

I name the press and the platform together because they are essentially the same thing.  Journalism is a kind of talk.  The press, it is fair to say, is ourselves; and every people, it may truly be said, has the press that it deserves.  But reading is a thing that we do chiefly for indulgence and pleasure in our idle time; and the press falls in with our mood, and supplies us with what we want in our weaker and lazier moments.  No responsible man, with an eager and active mind, spends much of his time on the newspapers.  Those who are excited to action by what they read in the papers are mostly content with the mild exercise of writing to these same papers to explain that some one else ought to do something and to do it at once.  Their excitement worries themselves more than it hurts others.  When the devil, with horns and hooves, appeared to Cuvier, the naturalist, and threatened to devour him, Cuvier, who was asleep at the time, opened his eyes and looked at the terrible apparition.  ‘Hm,’ he said, ’cloven-footed; graminivorous; needn’t be afraid of you;’ and he went to sleep again.  A man who says that he has not time to read the morning papers carefully is commonly a man who counts; he knows what he has to do, and he goes on doing it.  So far as I have observed, the cadets who are training for command in the army take very little interest in the exhortations of the newspapers.  They even prefer the miserable trickle which is all that is left of football news.