Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/323

 spoke in contemptuous terms of the press, and foreign and German writers on the press of Germany during his time refer to the low social position of editors and press correspondents,—"no foreign correspondent can be received at the German court;" "editors are paid small salaries and are not in the highest social circles;" "journalists are a pack of fellows too lazy to work and too illiterate to be schoolmasters of children;" "journalism in the Fatherland is the calling for those who, for some reason or other, have never found another calling;" "it carries no dignity, offers no position, involves neither social, political nor literary distinction;" "it is an estate without a status." These characterizations of those connected with the press as given by Bismarck and his contemporaries indicate the difficulties the editor had to over come in Germany during the Imperial régime.

The influences that justify a prominent paper of to-day in saying of a great metropolitan daily that "its editorial page is quite its least worthy part" are not confined to a single paper, or to a single country, and they are more fundamental than the editor's desire to sit in high places. The influence of the editor and of the editorial has apparently been undermined by two important classes of changes that have come within the past fifty years.

The first class is connected with the internal conduct of the press. The relative importance of the editorial has been affected by the development of the great news-collecting agencies. Readers who once turned to the first leader in the London Times for information in regard to forthcoming ministerial decisions would to-day receive the news through the press agencies. The Globe once "foreshadowed more or less distinctly the intentions or the measures of the Government," but newspapers even in 1880 had become so much more powerful in debate than either of the Houses of Parliament that they roused a certain jealousy in official circles,—"Ministers instead of being anxious to prefigure their measures through the press, and so preparing the public mind for them, are jealous of being forestalled by it." The introduction of the headline and the increasing dependence on it for