“Human interest” with a vengeance. But the worst feature of this vulgarisation of the popular Press is the resulting vulgarisation of the public. News editors would not instruct their reporters to interview divorcées, husbands whose wives have just been killed in motor accidents, or bereaved mothers, unless journalistic insistence as the “personal touch” had so greatly succeeded in banning decent reticence. The law does not punish such outrages on public taste, although it punishes many offences of far smaller detriment to the community. Side by side with vulgarisation is persistent falsification of values. The Press promotes mass hysteria, as is shown by the excesses accompanying the visits of American film stars to England or of European queens to the United States. It consistently denounces the very evils, or imaginary evils for whose creation it is itself so largely responsible, finding, for instance, good “copy” both in detailed descriptions of a play alleged to be lewd, and in criticisms of the same play by clergymen who have not seen it. And it is driving privacy from the world by its discovery of the new creed that if the pen be mightier than the sword, the camera is mightier than either. Insistence on the personal note has also brought in its train a Mumbo-Jumbo belief in the virtue of names. It is assumed that the public will attach more importance to an article signed with a name with which it is familiar than by an unsigned contribution, and although this theory is based on a certain element of fact, it is in practice overworked to the point of nausea. The reader will no doubt attach special importance to an article under the signature of Arnold Bennett, or H. G. Wells, especially if it deal with a subject with which the writer is particularly identified. He will also be more impressed by an article on tennis by Suzanne Lenglen than by an equally good but anonymous contribution. But is he equally impressed by the fact that a column of platitudes on motherhood, the contemporary young woman, or the decay of church-going, is signed by a, no doubt, estimable lady, whose only claim to public distinction is that she is the wife of an ex-Lord Mayor or the bearer of an obscure Hungarian title? Editors and proprietors apparently think so, thus indicating their cynical estimate of the level of public intelligence.