Derby Day is given in the Press the prominence of a grand European event. Descriptions of what the ladies wear at Ascot occupy as many columns in the newspaper as the condition of four million unemployed occupy lines. The attention of the public is engulfed in second-rate sport. It is not as if there were a real boom in sport. The war has effected men's physique and their nerves so that most sporting exhibitions are of the second class. Strictly speaking, it is not an interesting cricket year. But the interest in the county competitions has been whipped up by the Press till people buy special editions of papers, not for the latest news from Silesia or Turkey, or of the great strikes, but to know how Middlesex or Lancashire is getting on. England versus Australia is greatly starred. England loses matches, and the nation seems as much plunged in gloom as she was at the failures of the old South African War. In the golf and tennis and polo competitions there is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for the _mens sana_ of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national status in our own esteem. But even our secondary public interests are not in vital matters. The traveller returning to London in the summer of 1921 plunges into a whole series of unsavoury divorce cases being threshed out in public. Divorce is applied for, considered, granted, in every capital in Europe, but nowhere does it receive the publicity in the Press that it does in England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit, and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, but Paris, with all its men-and-women troubles, has no salacious columns in its papers comparable to those of England. It would not at present pay in Paris; the people are not so much interested. Sport is the first interest; divorce second; and only third comes the great coal strike which threatens a revolution in industrial life. Fourth in interest come anti-waste crusades directed against an unpopular Government. Then the Irish trouble, and after that probably European affairs. "They're writing so much about sport just to keep people's minds off the coal strike and more serious matters," says a comfortably-minded citizen. "The Government gives the papers a hint every day as to the line to take."