17.
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 .
