It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, or rather what can be done, to secure to fastidious people some show and shadow of privacy in their homes.  The silly and vulgar passion of people for knowing all about their neighbors’ affairs, which is bad enough while it takes shape merely in idle gossip of mouth, is something terrible when it is exalted into a regular market demand of the community, and fed by a regular market supply from all who wish to print what the community will read.

We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the buyer or the seller; we think, on the whole, the buyer.  But then he is again a seller; and so there it is,—­wheel within wheel, cog upon cog.  And, since all these sellers must earn their bread and butter, the more one searches for a fair point of attacking the evil, the more he is perplexed.

The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his work, write what the man who prints will buy.  The man who prints must print what the people who read will buy.  Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest hands?  Clearly, upon the last buyer,—­upon him who reads.  But things have come to such a pass already that to point out to the average American that it is vulgar and also unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details about his neighbors’ business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to the currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire and strychnine upon mucous membranes.  The diseased palate craves what has made it diseased,—­craves it more, and more, and more.  In case of stomachs, Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abuses to a stand-still,—­dyspepsia, and delirium-tremens, and so on.

But she takes no account, apparently, of the diseased conditions of brains incident to the long use of unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food.  Perhaps she never anticipated this class of excesses.  And, if there were to be a precisely correlative punishment, it is to be feared it would fall more heavily on the least guilty offender.  It is not hard to fancy a poor soul who, having been condemned to do reporters’ duty for some years, and having been forced to dwell and dilate upon scenes and details which his very soul revolted from mentioning,—­it is not hard to fancy such a soul visited at last by a species of delirium-tremens, in which the speeches of men who had spoken, the gowns of women who had danced, the faces, the figures, the furniture of celebrities, should all be mixed up in a grotesque phantasmagoria of torture, before which he should writhe as helplessly and agonizingly as the poor whiskey-drinker before his snakes.  But it would be a cruel misplacement of punishment.  All the while the true guilty would be placidly sitting down at still further unsavory banquets, which equally helpless providers were driven to furnish!