If a man wish to perceive to what degraded passes the art of writing may come and yet retain the qualities of intelligibility and apparent reasonableness, let him peruse the morning papers and die the death. The reek and offence of them smells to heaven. They are a sure indication of the decadence of the English mind and of the cupidity and unscrupulousness of the English journalist. There has been nothing like them, nothing to compare with them, for cheapness and futility and banality in the history of the world. They are more to be fearful of than the pestilence, inasmuch as they spell intellectual debasement, the corruption of the public taste, and the defilement of the public spirit. Their very literal innocuousness condemns them. It is their boast that they may be read in the family without a blush. Their assumption of morality and puritanical straitlacedness is admirable. Beneath it there lie a licentiousness of purpose, a disregard for what is just, and a contempt for what is decent and of good report which are calculated to make the angels weep. When one inquires into the personnel of the staffs by which these papers are run, one is confronted with exactly the kind of man one expects to meet. First of all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant and irresponsible as only an Englishman can be. The saving touch of seriousness does not enter into his composition. He neither reads nor thinks. Beer, billiards, and free lunches, free entry to the less edifying places of amusement, a minimum of work and a maximum of pay, constitute his ideal of the journalist's career, and he is always doing his best to live up to it. Of responsibility to anybody save his immediate chief, who, after all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he has not the smallest notion. His duty is neither by himself nor by the public. All that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief and to his paper, and it is his pride and joy that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming.