ever channel it comes, it must be the breath of life that vivifies the press. This does not mean that the editor, the reporter , and the correspondent must express their personal opinions on all subjects brought forward in the press, - far from it. It does mean
that the newspaper as a whole must itself so understand and so convey to its readers a sense of relationships, so respect values and relative proportions, and so discern the meaning of the times that its value will be rendered permanent. In spite of its name, the chief function of the newspaper is not to give the news, it is not even exclusively to reflect public opinion ,- important as this is, - but it is to record all contemporaneous human interests, activities, and conditions and thus to serve the future. What the historian wishes from the newspaper is not news, - that always ultimately comes to him from other sources, but a picture of contemporary life. But not only must the newspaper interpret the events that it consciously reports, it must in its turn be interpreted by those who use it in a reconstruction of the past. It must be evident that not all of the parts of a newspaper are of equal value to the historian, or will be of equal value, — the proportion shifts from year to year, even in the same paper ; the country weekly has one value in a reconstruction of the past, a quite different value is attached to the metropolitan daily . Much that passes as news and fills the foreground of the present will later on lapse into ob scurity and be of no service whatever to the historian . The reader on his partmust have the seeing eye and the understanding mind. The parts of the press that are most obviously of immediate service in reconstructing the past are the editorial,the illustration and the advertisement. The editorial serves in a measure to reconstruct current opinion ,
yet its value is somewhat lessened by the tendency of some editors " to keep an ear to the ground," a tendency that must in part vitiate the value of editorials on political questions and other mooted subjects, like preparedness. Lamartine spoke of the scum that rises to the surface when thenation boils and the editorial sometimes reflects the superficial rather than funda mental public opinion . But no part of the press has been so fre
quently reprinted as has the editorial column. Various collections
