The party's intentions
were good but his spelling was faulty.
An Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind;
for an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about
Englishmen residing in England; it prints them about people resident
in other lands. There is a good reason for this and the reason
is based on prudence. In the first place the private life of a
private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers
dare not meddle; besides, the paper that printed a faked-up tale
about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and
also extensively sued. As for public men, they are protected by
exceedingly stringent libel laws. As nearly as I might judge,
anything true you printed about an English politician would be
libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true.
It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority,
that when the editor of a live London daily finds the local grist
to be dull and uninteresting reading he straightway cables to his
American correspondent or his Paris correspondent - these two being
his main standbys for sensations - asking, if his choice falls on
the man in America, for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American
train smash-up, or a Nature freak, or a scandal in high society
with a rich man mixed up in it. He wires for it, and in reply he
gets it. I have been in my time a country correspondent for city
papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.
As a result America, to the provincial Englishman's understanding,
is a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep;
or a prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon
that her child is born with a complexion changeable at will and
an ungovernable appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a
monkey dinner or poisoning his wife, or something. Also, he gets
the idea that a through train in this country is so called because
it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a
man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from
Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to
the station at traintime with a bucket. Under the headlining
system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train
in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up,
becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! But a head-on
collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or
Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Iincident. Yet the official
Blue Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in
the three months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed
and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.
Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable,
and the most backward about offering lip-service in praise of his
own achievements or his country's achievements, so, in the same
superlative degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant
of boasters.
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