Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/84

68 infrequently dipped in gall. The Financiero Mexicana deals with commercial affairs and the money market in an able manner. Religious sheets are popular and plentiful. El Pais (The Country) and El Tiempo (The Times) are both ably conducted and widely read. La Tribuna is a strong Catholic bi-weekly, with highly Conservative tendencies which appeal to many of the older generation.

As has happened in other countries, Mexican journalism has been powerfully affected by the spirit of the times. The once dignified and rather sombre productions which glided rather than fell from the printing-presses of Mexico city have given way to newspapers which in tone reflect the "new" American spirit of journalism, its "human" note, its rather gross personalities, its meretricious smartness, its tendency towards the flippant and frivolous. Added to this we find a tendency towards the exaggerated in language which has nothing in common with the gift of ardent utterance we have before alluded to as despised by British writers. That gift is the property of distinguished writers alone. But the Latin-American and Mexican journalist deems it essential to copy this exalted style, and, as he does not in most cases possess the great powers necessary to the fulfilment of such a task, he produces false rhetoric and mistakes the use of superlatives for eloquence. In his totally undisciplined efforts such phrases as "magnificent," "immortal," "fabulous," and the like abound; whilst he can praise no public man without the employment of such adjectives as "illustrious" and "distinguished." The reiteration of such phrases is irritating and monotonous, but perhaps not more so than to read in our own newspapers that "It appears" that such and such an event occurred, or that "Alderman Jones is temporarily laid aside with a distressing attack of sciatica." The cliché is as rife among ourselves as elsewhere.

In spite of this tendency towards flippancy and fulsomeness in the lower ranks of Mexican journalism, the opinionative matter in the leading dailies of the capital is, in general, of