It is not my intention, however, to enter into a sort of ten nights' discussion with Mr. Crosland. He has had his say and taken the whipping he deserved. My business is with the English journalist; and while I shall not descend to personalities in dealing with him, I hope to show that his brilliance and liveliness and smartness, though much vaunted, are neither a boon nor a blessing either to journalism as a force or to society at large. I think that it may be fairly set down for a fact that the fine flower and consummate expression of English journalism is the halfpenny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would pretend to find in the halfpenny newspaper the sententious dulness and flat-footedness which are supposed to characterise the journalistic work of the Scot. The smartness of the halfpenny press is indeed not even American. There is but one epithet for it, and that is English. Broadly speaking, its appeal is directly and exclusively to the bathotic. In England the bathotic has always had the majority in its grip. The majority notoriously has no mind. It is a thing of one emotion, an instrument of one stop. On that stop--the bathotic stop--the English journalist makes a point of playing. There has been a time in his history when he believed in the educative possibilities and duties of his profession. He long held with the Scot that the Press was a power, and that it was becoming that it should glory in being a power for the betterment of the race. After many shrewd searchings and commercial gropings, the English journalist discovered that the way to fame and fortune lay in the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned to sing songs of Araby in one squalid key every morning, and he has since been able to keep a gig and out-circulate everything that considers itself possessed of circulation. He has played, as one might say, old Harvey with the _Daily Telegraph_. He has put the _Times_ to the shame of being a journal that "nobody reads." More than all, he has said flatly to the English people, "You are a rabbit-brained crowd, and here for your delectation and your coppers is the worst that can be written for you." When England comes to her day of reckoning, in the hour when she shall see her own mischance and is fain to remember the names of her destroyers, none of them will seem to her so flagrant and so to be deprecated as the English journalist. "Behold," she will say, "the monster who convinced me that it was beautiful to split infinitives; that it was elegant to begin six paragraphs on one page with the blessed statement, 'A dramatic scene was enacted in Mr. Thingamybob's court yesterday'; that good books are to be worthily pronounced upon by sub-editors in the intervals of waiting for the three o'clock winner; and that, so far from being a reproach to one, the bathotic was the only honourable and creditable attitude of mind."