So that in estimating the capacities and contents of the American mind, which we have no means of lining up in its hundred million individual manifestations and examining directly, an analysis of the American newspaper is a fair rough-and-ready method. What everybody reads does not tell the whole story of what everybody is, but it tells a good deal. Moreover, it is not necessary to analyze any one newspaper or to separate its clientèle from that of any other newspaper. For though everybody knows that the New York _Tribune_ and the New York _World_ have distinct qualities which differentiate them from each other, that some papers are better and some are worse, yet on the whole the American newspaper is amazingly uniform from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is, indeed, a more or less unified institution fed by the same news services and dominated by kindred financial interests. If you travel much, as actors do, without interest in local affairs, when you go to the hotel news-stand in the morning, you cannot tell from the general aspect of the newspaper you pick up what city you are in; and in a small city it is likely to be a metropolitan paper that has come a hundred miles or more during the night. Indeed, this is the first thing to be learned about the American from a study of his newspapers, that he lacks individuality, is tediously uniform, and cut according to one intellectual pattern. He may have his “favourite” newspaper, and with no sense that his confession of habitude is shameful he may write the editor that he has read it constantly for forty years. But if it goes out of existence, like his favourite brand of chewing-gum or cigarettes, there is no aching void which cannot be comfortably filled by a surviving competitor. Editors, except those in charge of local news, move with perfect ease from one city to another; it is the same old job at a different desk.