When it comes to the choice of news, one cannot believe that American
editors are the best friends of their country. I am holding no brief for
many English editors; I think that our papers can be common too, and can
be too ready to take things by the wrong handle; but I think that more
vulgarising of life is, at present, effected by American journalists
than by English. There are, however, many signs that we may catch up.
Profusion is a characteristic of the American newspaper. There is too
much of everything. And when Sunday comes with its masses of reading
matter proper to the Day of Rest one is appalled. One thing is
certain--no American can find time to do justice both to his Sunday
paper and his Maker. It is principally on Sunday that one realises
that if Matthew Arnold's saying that every nation has the newspapers it
deserves is true, America must have been very naughty. How the Sunday
editions could be brought out while the paper-shortage was being
discussed everywhere, as it was during my visit, was a problem that
staggered me. But that the shortage was real I was assured, and
jokes upon it even got into the music halls: a sure indication of
its existence. "If the scarcity of paper gets more acute," I heard a
comedian say, "they'll soon have to make shoes of leather again."
But it is not only the Sunday papers that are so immense. I used to hold
the _Saturday Evening Post_ in my hands, weighed down beneath its bulk,
and marvel that the nation that had time to read it could have time for
anything else. The matter is of the best, but what would the prudent,
wise and hard-working philosopher who founded it so many years
ago--Benjamin Franklin--say if he saw its lure deflecting millions of
readers from the real business of life?
When we come to consider the American magazines--to which class the
_Saturday Evening Post_ almost belongs--and the English, there is no
comparison. The best American magazines are wonderful in their quality
and range, and we have nothing to set beside them. It is astonishing to
think how different, in the same country, daily and monthly journalism
can be. Omitting the monthly reviews, _Blackwood_ is, I take it, our
finest monthly miscellany; and all of _Blackwood_ could easily
and naturally be absorbed in one of the American magazines and be
illustrated into the bargain, and still leave room for much more. And
the whole would cost less! Why England is so poorly and pettily served
in the matter of monthly magazines is something of a mystery; but part
of the cause is the rivalry of the papers, and part the smallness of our
population. But I shall always hold that we deserve more good magazines
than we have now.