Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/83

 We adapt and modify what we have. We do not revive what we have lost. And the regeneration of the newspaper will be forced upon the newspaper-office by the development of public intelligence. Comment will probably during the next few decades be eliminated from daily journalism altogether, and confined to serious weekly publications, somewhat on the lines of our monthly reviews, and to other publications summarising the latter, like the present Review of Reviews, perhaps the most useful periodical now being issued, with the single exception of The Times. Thus the daily newspaper will be entirely a vehicle for the propagation of news, correctly so called: and very likely it will become almost entirely colourless, politically, because a well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selection. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the printed opinions, real or momentarily assumed, of other people. Thus, though the frantic popular paper of to-day will no doubt increase and multiply, and replenish its circulation books, as long as the present system of blind half-education survives, the newspaper which satisfies the new age will be a very dif-