Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/88

 change of views which newspapers subserve, and without careful newsgathering as to the progress in detail of various schemes and of public opinion concerning them.

To say that this kind of thing will constitute the most important class of news is not to imply that the public will develop an unintelligent indifference to news of other kind, though it is allowable to hope that it will develop an intelligent indifference to the trivialities at present solemnly chronicled by the popular papers. It may be doubted whether, even now, the public is quite so passionately interested in the minutiæ of murder trials as editors imagine: but with invention steadily moving on, and its consequences habitually developing in unexpected ways, there will be plenty of "news" to chronicle.

Of course the one class of news which is at once the most expensive and the most helpful to a daily paper—I mean its individual "exclusive" war correspondence—will be done with by the end of this century. Remembering the rate of progress foreseen in the eatly part of this work and the moral nature of that progress, we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not