To Mr. Dana’s personal invention are due many, if not most, of the broad changes which within a quarter of a century have transformed journalism in this country. From his individual perception of the true philosophy of human interest, more than from any other single source, have come the now general repudiation of the old conventional standards of news importance; the modern newspaper’s appreciation of the news value of the sentiment and humor of the daily life around us; the recognition of the principle that a small incident, interesting in itself and well told, may be worth a column’s space, when a large, dull fact is hardly worth a stickful’s; the surprising extension of the daily newspaper’s province so as to cover every department of general literature, and to take in the world’s fancies and imaginings as well as its actual events. The word “news” has an entirely different significance from what it possessed twenty-five or thirty years ago under the ancient common law of journalism as derived from England; and in the production of this immense change, greatly in the interest of mankind and of the cheerfulness of daily life, it would be difficult to exaggerate the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Dana’s alert, scholarly, and widely sympathetic perceptions. [Illustration: WILLIAM C. REICK ] The assaults which Dana made upon yellow journalism were not actuated by the jealous envy of one who has himself overlooked an opportunity. Everything that the _Sun_ attacked in yellow newspapers was something to which the _Sun_ itself never would have stooped--the faked or distorted interview, the product of the thief or the eavesdropper, the collection of back-stairs gossip, the pilfered photograph, the revelation of personal affairs beyond the public’s business, the arrogation of official authority, the maudlin plea for sympathy in a factitious cause, the gross exaggeration for sensation’s sake of a trifling occurrence, the appeal to sensualism, and the demagogic attack upon the rich. Right endures, and where is yellow journalism? Gone where the woodbine twineth. Its prototype, the wild ass, stamps o’er its head and cannot break its sleep. The “journalism that does things” doesn’t do anything any more except to try and teach its men to write articles the way the _Sun_ has been printing them since 1868. In a chart of new journalism the largest, blackest X-mark would show where the body of new journalism, slain by public taste, lies buried forever. The New York _World_, once the most ingenious exponent of yellow journalism, has become as conservative as the _Sun_ was in the days when Joseph Pulitzer worked for Dana. Mr. Hearst’s papers, once the deepest of all yellows, now hold up their hands in horror when they see, beside them on the news-stands, the bold, black head-lines of the _Evening Post_! Yellow journalism said to its readers: