Necessarily we are all fond of murders, scandals, swindles, robberies,
explosions, collisions, and all such things, when we know the people,
and when they are neighbors and friends, but when they are strangers we
do not get any great pleasure out of them, as a rule. Now the trouble
with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the
whole earth for blood and garbage and the result is that you are daily
overfed and suffer a surfeit. By habit you stow this muck every day, but
you come by and by to take no vital interest in it—indeed, you almost
get tired of it. As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns
strangers only—people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand
miles, ten thousand miles from where you are. Why, when you come to
think of it, who cares what becomes of those people? I would not give
the assassination of one personal friend for a whole massacre of those
others. And, to my mind, one relative or neighbor mixed up in a scandal
is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders gone
rotten. Give me the home product every time.