On the other hand a great many people like to see their names in print. The remark “don’t put my name in the paper” often means “do put my name in the paper,” with little care as to the accompanying comment.
Many people have a terrible and I think needless fear of what the newspaper can do and say to make or unmake them, to give a book or a play a reputation or kill it outright. I notice that a play often becomes very popular when its first critics condemned it, and the same can be said of books. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Helper’s Irrepressible Conflict and Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee were not advertised into notice by the Press. Their force made the Press advertise them.
The Press, which so often claims to “mould popular opinion” is in reality moulded by popular opinion and follows it, while sometimes claiming to lead it. There is a power which brings men and movements for greater or lesser periods into public notice, which the Press does not manufacture.
The Press which claims indirectly to have so much of the public morals and the public good in its care and keeping—this “lever of civilization” which will deluge its columns for days and weeks with the preliminaries of a prize fight or parades for a similar time the details of a scandal, places a great deal before the eyes of every boy and girl which seems to me neither civilized nor civilizing.
I object here neither to the prize fight nor its publication. But I can’t think the man who spreads it all broadcast day after day before the community as a promoter of the highest refinement or civilization.
The Press of to-day is either ridiculing ideas or ignoring them entirely, which the Press of a near Future will treat as most important realities, just as fifty years ago, nine-tenths of the American newspapers treated the subject of human slavery. Did the Press of America mould public opinion in this respect or was it the idea that moulded public opinion first and as a necessary consequence the Press followed. Not that I advocate the idea that the editor should express himself far in advance of public opinion or rather of public knowledge. It is a very unwise thing to do. The inevitable result is the kick instead of the copper. Martyrdom is not the business of a newspaper. Many a leading editor of to-day deemed conservative and old fogyish is really more liberal and progressive than those who rail at him. But he is wiser than they and has learned that ideas which may be accepted and in full sway a century hence, cannot be argued as if in full fruition to-day. He may know also how to pave the way for a new idea, and is often doing it while his readers never realize his intent.
CHAPTER XXXV.
RECENT ANTIQUITY.
I was soon to leave for the Eastern States. When I realized that I was going, I found to my surprise that I had made a home in California, that it was an old home and about it clung all the memories and associations of an old home.
I wanted to visit the mines and take a farewell look at the camps where I had lived and worked in a period now fast becoming “old times,” and I went.
The term antiquity is relative in its character. Twenty years may involve an antiquity as much as 200 or 2,000. Indeed, as regards sensation and emotion, the more recent antiquity is the more strongly is it realized and more keenly felt. Standing to-day on the hillside and looking down on the site of the camp where you mined twenty-five years ago, and then going down that hill and treading over that site, now silent and deserted, and you realize, so to speak, a live antiquity. So far as ancient Greece or Rome are concerned, their histories would make no different impression on us if dated 600 years ago or 6,000. We are imposed upon by these rows of ciphers. They convey really no sense of time’s duration. They are but mathematical sounds. We know only that these nations and these men and women lived, ate, slept, drank, quarrelled, coveted, loved, hated, and died a long time ere we were born and that of it all we have but fragments of their history, or rather fragments of the history of a few prominent individuals.