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 train time 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 Incident. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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