the life of the United States," he says, and he writes from Stock bridge , apropos of his speedy return to England , “ the great relief will be to cease seeing the American newspapers .” 25 It was apparently only Edward Dicey among English readers of the
American press that found that “ one great merit ” was its " comparative freedom from private personality .” 28
But even American journalists themselves deprecated, as did Walt Whitman , the tone of the American press, the presence of petty personalities in it, and the assumption that it was a matter of moment “ whether A eats roast beef or Graham bread, or whether he understands a given Scripture text this way or that
way." 27
The newspaper often yields to ill temper and vindictiveness and relentlessly persecutes men and measures to such an extent
that the persecution acts as a boomerang against the newspaper itself. The personal attack may be against Gladstone or Disraeli, Asquith or Lloyd George, Roosevelt or Bryan, free trade or pro tective tariff, prohibition or equal suffrage, but whatever the ob ject of the attack the temptation , not always resisted , has been to deal in personalities that infallibly record the bad manners of the attacking newspaper .
The newspaper may have a personality characterized by a narrow provincialism or sectionalism that merges into jealousy . The first number of the Southern Literary Messenger asks in its
first article, August, 1834 , “ Are we to be doomed forever to a kind of vassalage to our northern neighbor - a dependence for our
literary food upon our bretheren, whose superiority in all the great points of character, - in valor, eloquence and patriotism , we are no wise disposed to admit? ” and Southern writers constantly complained that the Northern papers did not notice their works.28 Newspapers may be characterized by independence of views, an independence either real or simulated . They may be fairly independent in politics, but six weeks before the November elec 35 Letters of Matthew Arnold , edited by G . W . E . Russell, II, passim . 36 Six Months in the Federal States, I, 47.
27 Walt Whitman , Brooklyn Eagle, February 26 , 1847, cited by C . Rod gers and J. Black, in The Gathering of the Forces, III, 253 – 255.
28 See numerous letters in Passages from the Correspondence of Rufus W .
