There has been in the last few years a notable increase in the number of books dealing with public opinion in its formation and expression. Obviously this is a result of the war, in which we had the experience of finding ourselves moving under the impulse of mass currents in a direction quite opposite to that prescribed by our national character and tradition, and to a destination which we could never, as individuals, have desired or chosen. We have become curious as to the processes of social psychology by which we were controlled. The war has educated public opinion into self-consciousness. Naturally a prime object of our consideration is the daily press.

Mr. Villard's book [Some Newspapers and Newspapermen] has a more modest aim than Mr. Lippmann set himself in his study of public opinion as an organism. It has a more limited objective than Mr. Upton Sinclair's attempt to psychoanalyze the press in The Brass Check. Some Newspapers and Newspapermen, as its title announces, is a study of the great dailies of the country in the light of their origin, history, environment, political and financial affiliations, and of the men who made and control them. It is a series of character sketches, in which each newspaper is a personality, expressed in the lineaments of its headlines and make-up and also in its behavior. It is a survey of elements of immense importance in our social life, and is comparable in scope to that study of municipalities made twenty years ago by Mr. Lincoln Steffens.

It is to be said at the outset that Mr. Villard is unusually well fitted for his task. He inherited the ownership of a great newspaper. No one ever questioned his journalistic ability or his high view of the responsibilities of the profession, to which he was willing to sacrifice material success. Since his retirement from the field he has occupied a favorable position for observation, and he has supplemented that observation with intelligent study of underlying conditions. It might be feared that Mr. Villard would write of his one-time rivals with bitterness or scorn. His judgments, it is true, are severe, but who will say that they are not just? Who will deny his indictment of the New York Times: “No journal has exceeded it in disseminating falsehoods, misrepresentations, and half truths during the unparalleled era of wholesale lying in which the whole world has lived since 1914”? Who can gainsay his comment on the Public Ledger: “The newspaper which dwells alongside the Saturday Evening Post, for all its excellent qualities and features, is without originality or distinction, and without a soul”? Yet the characters in Mr. Villard's drama are not all villains; and if he has no heroes he sees with admirable clearness the journalistic ideal and sets it forth with real eloquence.

In only a few matters, it seems to me, Mr. Villard's personal sympathy or animus has led him astray. The Minnesota Daily Star is a paper with 6,250 owners, and, as Mr. Villard says, “its success is of enormous moment to the cause of good journalism everywhere.” Yet the 6,250 owners were powerless when “the dominating force,” Thomas Van Lear, dismissed Herbert E. Gaston from the editorship. Mr. Villard attributes Mr. Gaston's departure to “a clash of personalities.” It was more than that—it was a clash of principles. In the interest of the experiment of a newspaper with distributed ownership the whole story should have been told. Similarly the story of Fremont Older's departure from the San Francisco Bulletin and his engagement with Hearst's Call and Post is passed over. Clearly, Mr. Older felt that he could serve his public through the Hearst connection. Mr. Villard apparently disagrees, but he sheers away from the issue. This omission is the more striking when contrasted with the way in which he attacks Norman Hapgood for accepting service under Hearst, not as the editor of a daily, but as a writer and editor of a monthly. Mr. Villard's hatred of Hearst dates from the days when he, and other respectable editors, were trying to play the game according to rules which Hearst would not recognize. He sees Mr. Hapgood with sorrow rather than anger, as a lost leader. “Just for a handful of silver he left us.” Nevertheless, from the absolutist point of view, Mr. Hearst looks a good deal like the others. From Mr. Villard's own pages it is permissible to conclude that Mr. Ochs and his Times are a greater and more subtle public danger than the Hearst press. And after all the sauce for Mr. Hapgood's goose is equally appropriate for Mr. Older's gander.

Undoubtedly the chief interest in Mr. Villard's book is in the narratives of successful struggle and the vivid portraits which lend to his subjects the interest of drama and character. He shows how practically all the great newspapers of this country owe their origin to some dominating individual, the New York Times to Ochs, the World to Pulitzer, the Herald to Bennett, the Chicago Tribune to Medill, the Louisville Courier-Journal to Watterson, the Kansas City Star to Nelson. Most of these, like the Italian condottieri, founded institutions which after their death continued to bear the impress of their personalities, and left power which under their successors tends to become diffused into a system. It is the glimpses which Mr. Villard gives of this system which make his book significant as a social study.

One of the first generalizations which the reader will make is the fact that news is now a commodity, valuable primarily for its salability, selected according to what editors think is public taste, and set forth with window dressing, counter displays, and advertising as in all other merchandising. And as in merchandising, the demand creates the supply, and the supply in turn is made the occasion of an artificial demand. The public wants certain goods, including trash and scandal and lies; the newspaper exists as a vast machine for purveying these goods, and the appetite of the public, particularly for trash, etc., grows by what it feeds on. The peculiar menace of the newspaper is that it is in this respect like an insidious habit-producing drug. The newspaper owner has it in his power to extend indefinitely the appetite of the public for wares which he has a special concern in marketing. He can make his readers desire and expect atrocities from Germany, follies from Russia, conspiracy and treason in America; and when his reader is intoxicated with this stuff he can sell him a war or a Red Raid.

Mr. Villard is not bound to suggest a remedy for this state of things and he does not do so. He is sympathetic toward experiments in diffused or cooperative ownership, but his training has disposed him to think of the power of the press in personal terms, and his hope for the future is in an appeal to personal leadership. This gives significance in his closing chapters on E. L. Godkin and W. L. Garrison. One suggestion of social value is implicit in his pages. He notes frequently that great increase of circulation has been accompanied by a decline of influence in local affairs; that the opinions and advice of such papers as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and the Louisville Courier-Journal no longer are decisive in respect to matters within the scope of the personal knowledge of their readers. It is possible to hope that in respect to matters of national and international concern, where the falsifications of the press are most disastrous, the public may, by painful education, acquire the protection of this skepticism, and learn by the development of a kind of reader's sense to make automatically the adjustments necessary to distinguish between news and propaganda. In that case, we could afford to take the newspapers and newspapermen more lightly, and Mr. Villard could write about them more cheerfully than at present.