In considering abuses which affect our journalism one should not forget certain conditions which set a limit to the corrupt manipulation of the greatest single agency of public instruction. A modern newspaper is a large capitalistic enterprise, of course, but its business is peculiar in that it must sell its product to tens of thousands of people every day at the price of a cent or two per copy. However plutocratic a paper may be at one end it always represents the extreme of democracy at the other. Our press is occasionally prostituted by large moneyed interests, but it is in much more constant danger of that directly opposite form of corruption, namely demagogy. Reform of the press depends ultimately upon the reform of its readers. Even on the latter side, however, we have to note an increasing and very gratifying readiness on the part of our papers to tell the American people the truth about themselves and about foreign peoples regardless of all our old time prejudices and antipathies.[44] Reverting to the plutocratic influences affecting the press, however, we have seen that in the nature of things no single newspaper can become the tool of all the anti-social interests. It can defend effectively only the few which for one reason or another are approved by the managers of its policy. Usually a newspaper which is thus silent or mildly unctuous on certain abuses endeavours to rehabilitate itself by the condemnation, sometimes in a sensational and even hysterical fashion, of other abuses, thus conducting, so to speak, a vigorous department of moral foreign affairs. As a result the position taken by the press as a whole on most points is strongly favourable to the public interest. On this ground one may find a philosophic justification for the sentiment so compactly phrased by Mr. George William Curtis to the effect that “no abuse of a free press can be so great as the evil of its suppression.”[45]