Let it be conceded that their intentions were largely laudable. The appeal of the newspaper had previously been restricted to a degree almost incredible to contemporary men and women under thirty. The daily paper was the preserve of the well-to-do and the “comfortable classes”; the masses bought evening papers for racing tips and other sporting information, and on Sundays they were regaled with a ragôut of the murders, the robberies, the assaults, the divorces, and the more unsavoury police court cases of the week. Journals of international repute, such as the _Times_, the _Daily Telegraph_, the _Neue Freie Presse_, the _Journal des Débats_, sold fewer copies in a week than the popular organs now dispose of in a day. The Harmsworths, the Pearsons, the Hearsts, were to change all that. In order to make the daily paper a necessity, or a habit, of the masses, it was essential to depart from the pomposity of the older journals, with their long and platitudinous leading articles about nothing in particular, their unattractive “make-up,” their bald presentation of news, the immense length of their police court reports, and their adherence to the theory that the fall of a Cabinet in Patagonia was of more interest to the reader than a murder on his doorstep. The motto of the new Press was Brightness, Brevity, Enterprise, and Cheapness. It introduced photographs. It presented its news more attractively. It catered for the interests of women. It printed the light, but informative, article on topics of the day, often written by a specialist. It quickened up the transmission both of the news and of the newspaper. It aimed, in short, at mirroring passing events for the multitude rather than providing reading matter to be digested at leisure by the banker, the lawyer, the country gentleman, and the politician. And it succeeded remarkably――up to a point. But man cannot live by brightness alone. And brightness became a fetish. Insensibly, and on the whole probably unconsciously, at least at first, the newspaper made excessive sacrifices in the pursuit of its passion for the purely readable. It concentrated on the tabloid and the snippet. It plastered its pages with pictures, so that we have reached the stage at which if Dean Inge, Bernard Shaw, the ex-Kaiser, President Coolidge, Mr. Lloyd George, or Mr. Charles Chaplin be mentioned on six consecutive days of the week by the same paper, each mention will be accompanied by a photograph, usually the same photograph, the size of a postage stamp. Similarly, the obsession of the Press for “human interest stories” (a characteristic legitimate enough in itself) has been developed to the point at which the wives and mothers of condemned murderers are interviewed directly after the verdict with a request for their comments on the justice of the sentence, while respectable householders are despatched with cameras to photograph the tears of miners’ widows after a colliery accident.