There are also articles in which women are instructed how to dress, cook, arrange a luncheon table, plan schemes of interior decoration, pack their trunks for a holiday, economise in the household, and retain the affection of their husbands. The residue is news. But not all of it. For much of this residue is news only in a specialised and restricted sense. City notes, produce market notes, the movements of shipping, and golf, bridge, gardening, or motoring notes do not appeal to every reader. Nor, for that matter, does literary criticism, or the critiques of plays, films, concerts, and picture exhibitions. But the residue of the residue is news. And that includes “gossip” by ladies and gentlemen apparently on terms of the utmost intimacy with Royalty and the nobility and gentry, the deaths of centenarians, the bright sayings of witnesses at police courts, the witty sayings of judges, the wise sayings of magistrates, and the futile sayings of coroners. Add a crossword puzzle, and you have a newspaper. Democracy’s Mentor. New inventions and institutions achieve popularity in accordance with the readiness with which they lend themselves to vulgarisation. So it has been with wireless and the kinema, and so it is with the Press. Cynics may say that every country has the newspapers it deserves, but that begs the question. The mass of the public undoubtedly likes its newspapers well enough (without having any very great respect for them) but it also likes novels and film plays entirely devoid of artistic value, just as it likes third-rate music and fourth-rate pictures. The real question is how far is popular taste natural, and how far has it been debauched by those who aim at giving the public what it wants, or what it is supposed to want. A brewer who succeeds in inducing his customers to acquire a taste for doctored or synthetic beer may be entitled to say that he is giving them what they like. But he is not entitled to say that they are incapable of appreciating unadulterated malt and hops, or that they would really prefer the genuine article if they were allowed a free choice between the two. When compulsory schooling led to an immense and sudden increase in the number of people able to read without difficulty, well-meaning enthusiasts rejoiced at the prospect of the artisan beguiling his leisure with Dante, Milton, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Darwin, George Eliot, or the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actually, these newcomers to the world of letters turned mostly to the penny novelette and the “bitty” weekly. They might have patronised something better if the pioneers of reading matter for the million had made the experiment of seeing whether there was a market for something better. But the experiment was not made. And it was on the basis of a culture largely represented by the “snippety” weekly, that the creators of newspapers for the million began to build about a generation ago.