It was not said cynically. It was no effort to be funny. It was natural and inevitable. Lord Riddell himself did good to the press, and by a certain repercussion the British Empire benefited. It was a publicity "stunt" that has never been equalled. Never before did one man have world opinion so much in his hands. Only Riddell's personality, his friendliness, his apparent disingenuousness, his trifling, enabled him to exercise his power--these and the immense demand for publicity, where aside from his there was little. [Illustration: LORD RIDDELL] The hospitality of news columns is not extended to officials alone. A vast industry second only to that of news collecting has been built up for the purpose of conveying opinions to readers in the guise of news. Its constant growth is a proof of its success. The reason for the opening of newspaper columns to it is commercial. A variety of interests and opinions tends to reflect itself, as at Paris, in a multiplicity of newspapers. The American newspaper proprietor has avoided competition by steadily restricting the expression of opinion first in the news columns and then on the editorial page, so as to offend as few of his readers as possible, and then opening his news columns to opinions which he could not approve on his editorial page, provided they could be disguised as news. But the faults of public opinion as a governing force do not spring from an uncritical journalism, conducted in haste and under compulsion to be interesting rather than adequate, too little edited by its editors and too much edited by others. The trouble with Therese is her lack of mind. In spite of her good sense and habit of giving excellent advice she is _bornee et, si l'on veut, stupide_. We do not find in her what Rousseau was convinced he found in her, "a deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." We know more about the public mind today than Jefferson did when he wrote about it. We have studied the psychology of the mob and we know that the psychology of the public is not different. Like the mind of Therese, the public mind has never grown up; with this difference, that the mind of Therese never could grow up and the mind of the public, we hope, will. The public mind is young. Only for a very few years in the history of the race has there been any such thing as a conscious public. Jefferson was right in thinking that its mind was not the sum of the individual minds: nevertheless, it is not a "deposit for virtue." Men act in a mass quite differently from the way they act as individuals, only unfortunately there is not any necessary divine rightness about the way they act: there is often divine wrongness. We have built up the machinery for converting one hundred million widely scattered people into a public, for giving it a sense of community, but we have not at an equal rate built up a public mind.