A problem for the consideration of the Dictators of the Press is that of reconciling the up-to-date nature of the modern newspaper in most respects with its extraordinary conservatism in others, an inconsistency that affords genuine amusement to the student of contemporary life and manners. The Press is still old-fashioned enough to regard Woman (with a very large “W”) as a remarkable creature that has only just been discovered. Her slightest and most inconsequential doings are regarded as of the most compelling interest. “Women Present at Football Match” declaim the headlines, and the game is immediately vested with a special and romantic atmosphere.[7] [7] I do not dilate on this theme, since it has so admirably been expounded by Rose Macaulay, who is human enough to rebel against her sex being treated by the Press as though it were almost human. Again, we have progressed beyond the “Book of Snobs,” but “public schoolboy,” “old Etonian,” “wife of Ex-M.P.,” and “Colonel” are still imagined by sub-editors to be invested in the reader’s mind with an aura denied to the mass of human beings. As for members of the nobility, let an amiable and undistinguished peer die of heart failure in his eightieth year, or collide in his motor car with a taxi-cab, and the news is conveyed to a bored public by means of special contents bills. For the public is bored, when it is not disgusted, by these endeavours to make the world safe for Snobocracy. Yet a journalist who attempted to point out that both social values and news values had altered since the days of the Great Exhibition, and, in particular, since the Great War, would be told that he did not know his business and that he was most certainly a Bolshevik. Again, while proprietors and editors long ago realised the implication of Northcliffe’s discovery that Woman was a creature of sufficient intelligence and curiosity to read a newspaper (even if only for the advertisements of drapers), they still regard her in the light of an intellectual crétin so far as concerns the provision of reading matter. If any critic consider this statement too severe, let him――or her――concentrate exclusively for the next two days on the fashion and “Society” columns and the “Woman’s Pages” of the Popular Press. Moreover, the editorial conception of women is that they are without exception possessed of inexhaustible means, leisure, and ability to make holiday at expensive resorts all the year round and to attend all the costliest “functions” as a matter of course. No other explanation of the fatuous drivel offered up for the special delectation of female readers offers itself to the reasoning mind. Do you think I have been unfair? Then read this characteristic paragraph from an evening paper, headed “Earnest Young Women”: