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some new activity not thought of by others. It may finance an expedition to Africa, or to the North Pole; it may promote a

“ without stop ” aeroplane flight between two distant cities, or between two continents; it may secure interviews with great

potentates who have never before been interviewed ; it may for the nonce become a detective bureau and ferret out crimes the

existence of which was unsuspected by the police; it may avail itself of work done by the Associated Press and secure for pub

lication in its own columns in the same issue the editorial comment of a hundred papers in every part of the country on

important public measures; it may summarize the viewsof a thou sand foreign -languagenewspapers printed in America ; itmay carry on a postal card canvass to ascertain public opinion on every conceivable subject; it may print weekly editions in Braille for

the use of the blind ; it may become a publisher and put on the market a great encyclopaedia, a popular dictionary, an important atlas, a history of the war, or sets of standard authors; — there is no limit to the creative activities of the modern journal in its

efforts to improve on the now dishonored scoop. “ Journalism busies itself now with everything that affects the public welfare ”

said the New York Tribune, as far back as February 11, 1873 in an editorial, “ A new field for journalism .” It is of interest to compare these activities as they have been developed collectively by the press, with the activities that have

been accumulated on a large scale by a single newspaper like the London Daily Mail.32 This has been considered to have reached

the farthest goal in newspaper enterprise, yet a study of the activities organized, fostered , and assisted to a successful issue

by the Athenaeum in its early days might lead a newspaper of to -day to speak of its own achievements with becoming modesty.

Among them were the Sir John Franklin relief expedition, the establishment of the Public Record Office in 1847, hygienic and

sanitary reforms as a result of the cholera epidemic in 1849, penny banks, mechanics ' institutes, postal reform, prison reform , reform of the criminal laws, housing of the London poor, the 32 W. E. Carson, Northcliffe: Britain 's Man of Power, “ A Wonderful Newspaper," chap. V ; W . D . Newton, “ The Practical Vision ,” The Bookman (London ), January, 1917, 51: 124- 126 ; F . A . McKenzie, The Mystery of the Daily Mail, 1896 – 1921.