begins a characteristic investigation; but he finds the limitation is, after all, neither new nor rare that probably half the primary teachers of our great commonwealth are expected to do highly concrete work with one home-made paddle and a box of crayon, with instructions to use the latter economically. But what surprises him still more is the fact that as the pupil passes on up through the grades with ever increasing power for abstract thinking, he is supplied more and more with expensive material for concrete thinking. And when he gets into the college or university, where the mature student thinks best with both eyes shut, he finds chemical and physical laboratories costing thousands of dollars, and uniformed assistants to make the wheels go round. This stupendous partiality for the higher institutions is distressingly clear to all thoughtful superintendents; and to them primary teachers must look for that ultimate adjustment which shall place the more abundant supply where nature indicates the greater need.

While much of a superintendent's helpfulness is accomplished through the exercise of authority or by direct suggestion, as already indicated, the greater good comes from his higher service, that constant rational guidance through the educational processes, and, more especially, that persistent stimulus to broader culture and loftier heights in the professional life. Like Goldsmith's village preacher,

"He tries each art, reproves each dull delay,
Allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way."

ALICE IRWIN THOMPSON.

"TABLOID JOURNALISM": ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS.

RECENTLY, we have been treated to an experiment in daily journalism. Mr. Alfred Harmsworth has given us his idea of what the twentieth century newspaper should be. He calls it "tabloid journalism." Like everything new, it has been talked about, condemned, and approved.

This is an age of tabloids, which is only another name for concentration. We take our medicines in the form of pills and capsules and tabloids; we take our nourishment in the form of an ox boiled down to a tea cup; even our intellectual pabulum must come in a similar form. It is all characteristic of the rush, hurry, superficiality, and the desire to avoid trouble, which were the distinguishing traits of the century just closed. If a man is sick he takes his capsule because he can absorb it anywhere; it does not cause him to lose even a minute from his business; it is so delightfully simple; and so, in the same way, he can snatch a meal out of a spoonful of beef tea. He can also read the history of the world in one sitting in Somebody's "The Universe at a Glance in Pointed Paragraphs."

Mr. Alfred Harmsworth is a genius. He possesses the three great gifts which make for success wherever they may be employed. He has tremendous vitality; he has the power intuitively to divine what the world wants, and he has the ability to execute. Such a man would make his mark in any line of endeavor. He would be as successful in finance or statesmanship or war as he has been in journalism; and what he has accomplished in journalism the world knows.

A man of unusually keen perceptions and with the audacity which is spelled genius when it wins, Mr. Harmsworth saw in London a mine so rich and so easily to be worked that its golden possibilities were staggering. Education in England had succeeded admirably in turning out every year an ever-increasing host of half-baked sciolists of both sexes. The board schools, the Acts of Parliament, and the ever-zealous educational officers had enabled them to get hold of a smattering; and with the "Three Rs" they acquired something which had not been provided for by Parliament or boards of education. Crude, immature, raw, and un

able to assimilate the little knowledge which had been tabloidly furnished to them, the result of education, in nine cases out of ten, was to give them a vague longing for something which they could not define or express. It had given them aspiration for what they knew not; it had stirred passions and aroused desires which had shadowed across their minds, but never assumed substance. The "work'us kid," whose past was a grim recollection of starvation and torture, and whose anticipation of the future was equally joyless, gave way to the "board school boy," who quickly forgot his multiplication table and his grammar, but who never forgot that not everybody worked. In a word, he wanted to be amused. Here was a constituency ready made. Mr. Harmsworth gave the world his world of London, a city, remember, with a population greater than that of any State of the American Union, with three exceptions— "Answers." It was exactly what had been demanded; it was the answer to the unexpressed desire. It was neither vicious nor virtuous; it did not elevate, neither did it demoralize; it was not witty or enlightening; it was simply commonplace, dull, trivial, and exactly suited to the mental requirements of its readers. And that, after all, was the secret of nineteenth century commercial success-to give the peopleprecisely what they wanted. Errand boys and factory hands invested their coppers in "Answers." They read it at their lunch, and it was the Attic salt to their hunk of dry bread and rancid bacon. The errand boy took a tabloid, one of Mr. Harmsworth's paragraphs, as he went loitering between the bank and Lombard street; the young clerk in the interval between measuring half a yard of ribbon, furtively snatched a tabloid under the counter when the floorwalker's back was turned. Mr. Harmsworth was the P. T. Barnum of England. He furnished a "refined entertainment." He gave his readers amusement; he provided them with "jokes." Some of his tabloids were so deftly sugar-coated that “the useful information" which they contained could be taken by even the most sensitive stomachs.

One of the phenomena of the nineteenth century- one wonders if the same thing will continue during the present was the fecundity created by a demand. When a demand existed and an attempt was made to satisfy it, instead of the public being satiated, a new appetite was born. In nothing has this been so marked as in cheap literature, including in the term newspapers and magazines as well as books. The circulation of newspapers and magazines has enormously increased since their reduction in price. One "Answers" could not supply the ever-increasing demand.

Mr. Harmsworth's rivals, who were without his creative force,

but intelligent enough to follow where he led, saw their opportunity and threw into the insatiable maw "Answers" under other names.

Nor did Mr. Harmsworth propose to suffer the fate of most pioneers and, after having cleared the ground, see others garner the crops. He duplicated and reduplicated his original production, the prototype of the whole family, until to-day the news stands of London are covered with “Answers,” “Tit-Bits," "Smith's Scraps," "Jones' Sayings," "Brown's Hash," and so on through a couple of score more until one wonders who reads them and how they manage to exist. But the question who reads. them is quickly answered. Go into any bus or train or lunch room at any hour of the day or night and you see men and boys and women and girls taking and enjoying their tabloids.

The curious thing is that the reading is no longer confined to the class for whom it was originally intended, as the people of greater intelligence are not ashamed to acknowledge that they are addicted to tabloidism. Last summer, while going from London to Glasgow, I fell in with a middle-aged Englishman, whom I later learned was the executive of a large corporation. He had a bundle of papers and magazines, among them half a dozen brands of tabloids. We engaged in conversation, and When I expressed a preference

he courteously handed me a tabloid. for nutriment in another form, he explained that he found in tabloids a mental diversion. "I get tired of 'The Saturday Review' and 'The Spectator," he said, "and I read these things because they keep me from thinking."

They are all the same. They are all stamped from one die. Mr. Harmsworth knows his readers better than they know themselves. He knows that they are incapable of sustained thought, and that with them language is direct. Consequently, you must talk to them in as few words as possible; you must hold their attention in a sentence and not in a paragraph. In a story they want situations, not incidents. Occasionally, the proprietor originates a prize—a life insurance policy, a catchpenny scheme of some kind- and immediately his rivals take it for their own. Having assimilated one tabloid you have taken all; and, like the modern patent medicine, these tabloids have a variety of uses — from wrapping up the errand boy's lunch to lining the pantry shelves.

From the weekly "Answers" to the "Daily Mail" is a short step. Until the advent of Mr. Harmsworth into daily journalism, the London newspapers were the dullest, the heaviest, the most unattractive, and the least intelligent press in the world. This last assertion, I suppose, will be questioned. It is a fact, however, that in their gathering and

treatment of news, which includes the editorial comment upon it, the London newspapers have always displayed antiquated methods and an unintelligent grasp of events. I am quite aware of the fact that the editorial writers on the leading London papers are men of wide and thorough knowledge, and that it is popularly supposed that the important editorials are written by specialists- men who, in addition to their literary ability, have a professional and intimate knowledge of their subject; and yet, despite their knowledge and their professional attainments, the ignorance and glaring inaccuracies are astounding.

No one can know everything; and when I am given a ponderous column and a half on the latest archæological discovery I am quite willing to accept the writer's dictum for the correctness of his conclusions; but when I glanced over a review of a session of Congress just closed, as I did in London last summer, and in a column editorial discovered by actual count fourteen misstatements of facts and confusion of men and things, I wondered what had happened to the American "specialist." The old motto, "False in one, false in all," might be justly applied. If these writers are so ignorant of America, a country which has been brought so close to them, and whose people speak their own tongue, is it not a fair presumption that their ignorance must be much greater of countries more remote, whose peoples are alien to them in language and thought?

The editorial page of a London newspaper is ponderous, and the news pages are unsatisfactory, dull, and monotonous. The English reporter or correspondent is not trained to write, but simply to record facts. The well written account of an important event the opening of Parliament, the departure of troops, the return of a popular hero, a yacht race — which is such a marked feature of an American newspaper is unknown in England. The London editor shows his appreciation of the value of news by space. He gives to it several columns; but we find nothing but words, words, words. The descriptive, the photographic reproduction, the light and shade, the touch of wit, the playful fancy of the writer, the human interest—all this we know in the American newspaper; but one never sees it in the London reporter's "story." In fact, if I were asked to present the distinction between American and English reporting in a few words, I should say that in America we aim to give photographs, while in England they content themselves with working drawings made to exact scale.

If the people wanted tabloids once a week, was it not reasonable to suppose, Mr. Harmsworth argued, that they would swallow them every morning before breakfast? Again Mr. Harmsworth gave them just what