The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Charles Dudley Warner

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How full of information, of philosophic observation, of accurate
knowledge! It appears to be written by men of trained intellect and of
experience,--educated men of the world, who, by reason of their position
and character, have access to the highest sources of information.

The editorials of our journals seem to me better than formerly, improved
in tone, in courtesy, in self-respect,--though you may not have to go far
or search long for the provincial note and the easy grace of the
frontier,--and they are better written. This is because the newspaper has
become more profitable, and is able to pay for talent, and has attracted
to it educated young men. There is a sort of editorial ability, of
facility, of force, that can only be acquired by practice and in the
newspaper office: no school can ever teach it; but the young editor who
has a broad basis of general education, of information in history,
political economy, the classics, and polite literature, has an immense
advantage over the man who has merely practical experience. For the
editorial, if it is to hold its place, must be more and more the product
of information, culture, and reflection, as well as of sagacity and
alertness. Ignorance of foreign affairs, and of economic science, the
American people have in times past winked at; but they will not always
wink at it.

It is the belief of some shrewd observers that editorials, the long
editorials, are not much read, except by editors themselves. A cynic says
that, if you have a secret you are very anxious to keep from the female
portion of the population, the safest place to put it is in an editorial.
It seems to me that editorials are not conned as attentively as they once
were; and I am sure they have not so much influence as formerly. People
are not so easily or so visibly led; that is to say, the editorial
influence is not so dogmatic and direct. The editor does not expect to
form public opinion so much by arguments and appeals as by the news he
presents and his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an idea
until it becomes familiar, by the reading-matter selected, and by the
quotations of opinions as news, and not professedly to influence the
reader. And this influence is all the more potent because it is indirect,
and not perceived-by the reader.

There is an editorial tradition--it might almost be termed a
superstition--which I think will have to be abandoned. It is that a
certain space in the journal must be filled with editorial, and that some
of the editorials must be long, without any reference to the news or the
necessity of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at the moment
to fill the space with original matter that is readable. There is the
sacred space, and it must be filled. The London journals are perfect
types of this custom. The result is often a wearisome page of words and
rhetoric. It may be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much of
it. The necessity of filling this space causes the writer, instead of
stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made
perspicuous and telling, to beat it out thin, and make it cover as much
ground as possible. This, also, is vanity. In the economy of room, which
our journals will more and more be compelled to cultivate, I venture to
say that this tradition will be set aside. I think that we may fairly
claim a superiority in our journals over the English dailies in our habit
of making brief, pointed editorial paragraphs. They are the life of the
editorial page. A cultivation of these until they are as finished and
pregnant as the paragraphs of "The London Spectator" and "The New-York
Nation," the printing of long editorials only when the elucidation of a
subject demands length, and the use of the space thus saved for more
interesting reading, is probably the line of our editorial evolution.

To continue the comparison of our journals as a class, with the English
as a class, ours are more lively, also more flippant, and less restrained
by a sense of responsibility or by the laws of libel. We furnish, now and
again, as good editorial writing for its purpose; but it commonly lacks
the dignity, the thoroughness, the wide sweep and knowledge, that
characterizes the best English discussion of political and social topics.

The third department of the newspaper is that of miscellaneous
reading-matter. Whether this is the survival of the period when the paper
contained little else except "selections," and other printed matter was
scarce, or whether it is only the beginning of a development that shall
supply the public nearly all its literature, I do not know. Far as our
newspapers have already gone in this direction, I am inclined to think
that in their evolution they must drop this adjunct, and print simply the
news of the day. Some of the leading journals of the world already do
this.

In America I am sure the papers are printing too much miscellaneous
reading. The perusal of this smattering of everything, these scraps of
information and snatches of literature, this infinite variety and medley,
in which no subject is adequately treated, is distracting and
debilitating to the mind. It prevents the reading of anything in full,
and its satisfactory assimilation. It is said that the majority of
Americans read nothing except the paper. If they read that thoroughly,
they have time for nothing else. What is its reader to do when his
journal thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in a fair-sized
duodecimo volume, and on Sundays the amount of two of them? Granted that
this miscellaneous hodge-podge is the cream of current literature, is it
profitable to the reader? Is it a means of anything but superficial
culture and fragmentary information? Besides, it stimulates an unnatural
appetite, a liking for the striking, the brilliant, the sensational only;
for our selections from current literature are, usually the "plums"; and
plums are not a wholesome-diet for anybody. A person accustomed to this
finds it difficult to sit down patiently to the mastery of a book or a
subject, to the study of history, the perusal of extended biography, or
to acquire that intellectual development and strength which comes from
thorough reading and reflection.

The subject has another aspect. Nobody chooses his own reading; and a
whole community perusing substantially the same material tends to a
mental uniformity. The editor has the more than royal power of selecting
the intellectual food of a large public. It is a responsibility
infinitely greater than that of the compiler of schoolbooks, great as
that is. The taste of the editor, or of some assistant who uses the
scissors, is in a manner forced upon thousands of people, who see little
other printed matter than that which he gives them. Suppose his taste
runs to murders and abnormal crimes, and to the sensational in
literature: what will be the moral effect upon a community of reading
this year after year?

If this excess of daily miscellany is deleterious to the public, I doubt
if it will be, in the long run, profitable to the newspaper, which has a
field broad enough in reporting and commenting upon the movement of the
world, without attempting to absorb the whole reading field.

I should like to say a word, if time permitted, upon the form of the
journal, and about advertisements. I look to see advertisements shorter,
printed with less display, and more numerous. In addition to the use now
made of the newspaper by the classes called "advertisers," I expect it to
become the handy medium of the entire public, the means of ready
communication in regard to all wants and exchanges.

Several years ago, the attention of the publishers of American newspapers
was called to the convenient form of certain daily journals in South
Germany, which were made up in small pages, the number of which varied
from day to day, according to the pressure of news or of advertisements.
The suggestion as to form has been adopted bit many of our religious,
literary, and special weeklies, to the great convenience of the readers,
and I doubt not of the publishers also. Nothing is more unwieldy than our
big blanket-sheets: they are awkward to handle, inconvenient to read,
unhandy to bind and preserve. It is difficult to classify matter in them.
In dull seasons they are too large; in times of brisk advertising, and in
the sudden access of important news, they are too small. To enlarge them
for the occasion, resort is had to a troublesome fly-sheet, or, if they
are doubled, there is more space to be filled than is needed. It seems to
me that the inevitable remedy is a newspaper of small pages or forms,
indefinite in number, that can at any hour be increased or diminished
according to necessity, to be folded, stitched, and cut by machinery.

We have thus rapidly run over a prolific field, touching only upon some
of the relations of the newspaper to our civilization, and omitting many
of the more important and grave. The truth is that the development of the
modern journal has been so sudden and marvelous that its conductors find
themselves in possession of a machine that they scarcely know how to
manage or direct. The change in the newspaper caused by the telegraph,
the cable, and by a public demand for news created by wars, by
discoveries, and by a new outburst of the spirit of doubt and inquiry, is
enormous. The public mind is confused about it, and alternately
overestimates and underestimates the press, failing to see how integral
and representative a part it is of modern life.

"The power of the press," as something to be feared or admired, is a
favorite theme of dinner-table orators and clergymen. One would think it
was some compactly wielded energy, like that of an organized religious
order, with a possible danger in it to the public welfare. Discrimination
is not made between the power of the printed word--which is
limitless--and the influence that a newspaper, as such, exerts. The power
of the press is in its facility for making public opinions and events. I
should say it is a medium of force rather than force itself. I confess
that I am oftener impressed with the powerlessness of the press than
otherwise, its slight influence in bringing about any reform, or in
inducing the public to do what is for its own good and what it is
disinclined to do. Talk about the power of the press, say, in a
legislature, when once the members are suspicious that somebody is trying
to influence them, and see how the press will retire, with what grace it
can, before an invincible and virtuous lobby. The fear of the combination
of the press for any improper purpose, or long for any proper purpose, is
chimerical. Whomever the newspapers agree with, they do not agree with
each other. The public itself never takes so many conflicting views of
any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals are certain to
discover. It is impossible, in their nature, for them to combine. I
should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical
profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man,
that does not get somewhere in the press a hearer and a defender. We will
drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom it may concern.
With all its faults, I believe the moral tone of the American newspaper
is higher, as a rule, than that of the community in which it is
published.




CERTAIN DIVERSITIES OF AMERICAN LIFE

By Charles Dudley Warner

This is a very interesting age. Within the memory of men not yet come to
middle life the time of the trotting horse has been reduced from two
minutes forty seconds to two minutes eight and a quarter seconds. During
the past fifteen years a universal and wholesome pastime of boys has been
developed into a great national industry, thoroughly organized and almost
altogether relegated to professional hands, no longer the exercise of the
million but a spectacle for the million, and a game which rivals the
Stock Exchange as a means of winning money on the difference of opinion
as to the skill of contending operators.

The newspapers of the country--pretty accurate and sad indicators of the
popular taste--devote more daily columns in a week's time to chronicling
the news about base-ball than to any other topic that interests the
American mind, and the most skillful player, the pitcher, often college
bred, whose entire prowess is devoted to not doing what he seems to be
doing, and who has become the hero of the American girl as the Olympian
wrestler was of the Greek maiden and as the matador is of the Spanish
senorita, receives a larger salary for a few hours' exertion each week
than any college president is paid for a year's intellectual toil. Such
has been the progress in the interest in education during this period
that the larger bulk of the news, and that most looked for, printed about
the colleges and universities, is that relating to the training, the
prospects and achievements of the boat crews and the teams of base-ball
and foot-ball, and the victory of any crew or team is a better means of
attracting students to its college, a better advertisement, than success
in any scholastic contest. A few years ago a tournament was organized in
the North between several colleges for competition in oratory and
scholarship; it had a couple of contests and then died of inanition and
want of public interest.

During the period I am speaking of there has been an enormous advance in
technical education, resulting in the establishment of splendid special
schools, essential to the development of our national resources; a growth
of the popular idea that education should be practical,--that is, such an
education as can be immediately applied to earning a living and acquiring
wealth speedily,--and an increasing extension of the elective system in
colleges,--based almost solely on the notion, having in view, of course,
the practical education, that the inclinations of a young man of eighteen
are a better guide as to what is best for his mental development and
equipment for life than all the experience of his predecessors.

In this period, which you will note is more distinguished by the desire
for the accumulation of money than far the general production of wealth,
the standard of a fortune has shifted from a fair competence to that of
millions of money, so that he is no longer rich who has a hundred
thousand dollars, but he only who possesses property valued at many
millions, and the men most widely known the country through, most talked
about, whose doings and sayings are most chronicled in the journals,
whose example is most attractive and stimulating to the minds of youth,
are not the scholars, the scientists, the men of, letters, not even the
orators and statesmen, but those who, by any means, have amassed enormous
fortunes. We judge the future of a generation by its ideals.

Regarding education from the point of view of its equipment of a man to
make money, and enjoy the luxury which money can command, it must be more
and more practical, that is, it must be adapted not even to the higher
aim of increasing the general wealth of the world, by increasing
production and diminishing waste both of labor and capital, but to the
lower aim of getting personal possession of it; so that a striking social
feature of the period is that one-half--that is hardly an overestimate
--one-half of the activity in America of which we speak with so much
enthusiasm, is not directed to the production of wealth, to increasing
its volume, but to getting the money of other people away from them. In
barbarous ages this object was accomplished by violence; it is now
attained by skill and adroitness. We still punish those who gain property
by violence; those who get it by smartness and cleverness, we try to
imitate, and sometimes we reward them with public office.

It appears, therefore, that speed,-the ability to move rapidly from place
to place,--a disproportionate reward of physical over intellectual
science, an intense desire to be rich, which is strong enough to compel
even education to grind in the mill of the Philistines, and an inordinate
elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are
rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand.
They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view,
the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for
opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history
attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the
fear that we are losing the sense of the relative value of things in this
life.

Few persons come to middle life without some conception of these relative
values. It is in the heat and struggle that we fail to appreciate what in
the attainment will be most satisfactory to us. After it is over we are
apt to see that our possessions do not bring the happiness we expected;
or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes that can
make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a person's
highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions, but upon
what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion. The physical
satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual and moral
satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has to live with
himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the question is,
what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is worth just what
he has become. And I need not say that the mistake commonly made is as to
relative values,--that the things of sense are as important as the things
of the mind. You make that mistake when you devote your best energies to
your possession of material substance, and neglect the enlargement, the
training, the enrichment of the mind. You make the same mistake in a less
degree, when you bend to the popular ignorance and conceit so far as to
direct your college education to sordid ends. The certain end of yielding
to this so-called practical spirit was expressed by a member of a
Northern State legislature who said, "We don't want colleges, we want
workshops." It was expressed in another way by a representative of the
lower house in Washington who said, "The average ignorance of the country
has a right to be represented here." It is not for me to say whether it
is represented there. Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle
life to come to a conception of what sort of things are of most value. By
analogy, in the continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a
perception of what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view
of our tendencies. We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of
our extension of territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of
wealth, and in our rise to the potential position of almost the first
nation in the world. A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people
have we become? What are we intellectually and morally? For after all the
man is the thing, the production of the right sort of men and women is
all that gives a nation value. When I read of the establishment of a
great industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in
the increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether
it would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial
city of the same sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty
thousand are, how they live, what their morals are, what intellectual
life they have, what their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and
think about, and what chance they have of getting into any higher life.
It does not seem to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are
immensely increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty
more people are enabled on account of this to indulge in an unexampled,
unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but haven't we wit
enough to get that and at the same time to increase among the producers
of it the number of men and women whose horizons are extended, who are
companionable, intelligent beings, adding something to the intellectual
and moral force upon which the real progress of the Republic depends?

There is no place where I would choose to speak more plainly of our
national situation today than in the South, and at the University of the
South; in the South, because it is more plainly in a transition state,
and at the University of the South, because it is here and in similar
institutions that the question of the higher or lower plane of life in
the South is to be determined.

To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred
years, I should say that the important facts are not its industrial
energy, its wealth, or its population, but the stability of the federal
power, and the integrity of the individual States. That is to say, that
stress and trial have welded us into an indestructible nation; and not of
less consequence is the fact that the life of the Union is in the life of
the States. The next most encouraging augury for a great future is the
marvelous diversity among the members of this republican body. If nothing
would be more speedily fatal to our plan of government than increasing
centralization, nothing would be more hopeless in our development than
increasing monotony, the certain end of which is mediocrity.

Speaking as one whose highest pride it is to be a citizen of a great and
invincible Republic to those whose minds kindle with a like patriotism, I
can say that I am glad there are East and North and South, and West,
Middle, Northwest, and Southwest, with as many diversities of climate,
temperament, habits, idiosyncrasies, genius, as these names imply. Thank
Heaven we are not all alike; and so long as we have a common purpose in
the Union, and mutual toleration, respect, and sympathy, the greater will
be our achievement and the nobler our total development, if every section
is true to the evolution of its local traits. The superficial foreign
observer finds sameness in our different States, tiresome family likeness
in our cities, hideous monotony in our villages, and a certain common
atmosphere of life, which increasing facility of communication tends to
increase. This is a view from a railway train. But as soon as you observe
closely, you find in each city a peculiar physiognomy, and a peculiar
spirit remarkable considering the freedom of movement and intercourse,
and you find the organized action of each State sui generis to a degree
surprising considering the general similarity of our laws and
institutions. In each section differences of speech, of habits of
thought, of temperament prevail. Massachusetts is unlike Louisiana,
Florida unlike Tennessee, Georgia is unlike California, Pennsylvania is
unlike Minnesota, and so on, and the unlikeness is not alone or chiefly
in physical features. By the different style of living I can tell when I
cross the line between Connecticut and New York as certainly as when I
cross the line between Vermont and Canada. The Virginian expanded in
Kentucky is not the same man he was at home, and the New England Yankee
let loose in the West takes on proportions that would astonish his
grandfather. Everywhere there is a variety in local sentiment, action,
and development. Sit down in the seats of the State governments and study
the methods of treatment of essentially the common institutions of
government, of charity and discipline, and you will be impressed with the
variety of local spirit and performance in the Union. And this, diversity
is so important, this contribution of diverse elements is so necessary to
the complex strength and prosperity of the whole, that one must view with
alarm all federal interference and tendency to greater centralization.

And not less to be dreaded than monotony from the governmental point of
view, is the obliteration of variety in social life and in literary
development. It is not enough for a nation to be great and strong, it
must be interesting, and interesting it cannot be without cultivation of
local variety. Better obtrusive peculiarities than universal sameness. It
is out of variety as well as complexity in American life, and not in
homogeneity and imitation, that we are to expect a civilization
noteworthy in the progress of the human race.

Let us come a little closer to our subject in details. For a hundred
years the South was developed on its own lines, with astonishingly little
exterior bias. This comparative isolation was due partly to the
institution of slavery, partly to devotion to the production of two or
three great staples. While its commercial connection with the North was
intimate and vital, its literary relation with the North was slight. With
few exceptions Northern authors were not read in the South, and the
literary movement of its neighbors, such as it was, from 1820 to 1860,
scarcely affected it. With the exception of Louisiana, which was
absolutely ignorant of American literature and drew its inspiration and
assumed its critical point of view almost wholly from the French, the
South was English, but mainly English of the time of Walter Scott and
George the Third. While Scott was read at the North for his knowledge of
human nature, as he always will be read, the chivalric age which moves in
his pages was taken more seriously at the South, as if it were of
continuing importance in life. In any of its rich private libraries you
find yourself in the age of Pope and Dryden, and the classics were
pursued in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge in the time of Johnson. It
was little disturbed by the intellectual and ethical agitation of modern
England or of modern New England. During this period, while the South
excelled in the production of statesmen, orators, trained politicians,
great judges, and brilliant lawyers, it produced almost no literature,
that is, no indigenous literature, except a few poems and--a few humorous
character-sketches; its general writing was ornately classic, and its
fiction romantic on the lines of the foreign romances.