I am dealing here with the English journalist, because in my opinion, after the English sportsman and the English man of business, there is nothing under the sun so wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish. The elegant and austere writer who gave us _The Unspeakable Scot_ has said much which he no doubt hoped would lead people to believe that the British Press was entirely in the hands of Scotsmen, and that this accounted at once for its dulness and its continual advertisement of Scottish virtues. For my own part, I have no hesitation in asserting that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation is quite a mistaken one. In any case, it is obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr. Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from over the Border, the English journalist is not yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the land the remnant of him stands valiantly to its guns. It is well known, however, that, as a fact, the remnant very largely outnumbers its hated rival, the proportion of Scots to the proportion of Englishmen on the staffs of most newspapers being probably no higher than as one is to three. So that for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the English newspaper--the epithets are Mr. Crosland's own--the Englishman is at least equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Crosland's main complaint against the newspaper press of his country is that it lacks brilliance. So far as I am aware, it has never before been asserted that the function of a newspaper is to be brilliant. News is news all over the world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or of the suicide of a defaulting clerk may be Mr. Crosland's ambition in life, but most persons possessing such an ambition would transfer their finical attentions from the field of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morning papers, in which the soul of the average Englishman so delighteth, would be published from the Bodley Head or at the Sign of the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant Richards's.