This took place first in England during the Long Parliament and the Revolution of 1640. The Netherlands and a part of the imperial free towns of Germany followed later. In France the change was not consummated before the era of the great Revolution: in most other countries it occurred in the nineteenth century. The newspaper, from being a mere vehicle for the publication of news, became an instrument for supporting and shaping public opinion and a weapon of party politics.
The effect of this upon the internal organization of the newspaper undertaking was to introduce a third department, the editorship, between news collecting and news publication. For the newspaper publisher, however, it signified that from a mere seller of news he had become a dealer in public opinion as well.
At first this meant nothing more than that the publisher was placed in a position to shift a portion of the risk of his undertaking upon a party organization, a circle of interested persons, or a government. If the leanings of the paper were distasteful to the readers, they ceased to buy the paper. Their wishes thus remained, in the final analysis, the determining factor for the contents of the newspapers.
The gradually expanding circulation of the printed newspapers nevertheless soon led to their employment by the authorities for making public announcements. With this came, in the first quarter of the last century, the extension of private announcements, which have now attained, through the so-called advertising bureaus, some such organization as political news-collecting possesses in the correspondence bureaus.
The modern newspaper is a capitalistic enterprise, a sort of news-factory in which a great number of people (correspondents, editors, typesetters, correctors, machine-tenders, collectors of advertisements, office clerks, messengers, etc.) are employed on wage, under a single administration, at very specialized work. This paper produces wares for an unknown circle of readers, from whom it is, furthermore, frequently separated by intermediaries, such as delivery agencies and postal institutions. The simple needs of the reader or of the circle of patrons no longer determine the quality of these wares; it is now the very complicated conditions of competition in the publication market. In this market, however, as generally in wholesale markets, the consumers of the goods, the newspaper readers, take no direct part; the determining factors are the wholesale dealers and the speculators in news: the governments, the telegraph bureaus dependent upon their special correspondents, the political parties, artistic and scientific cliques, men on 'change, and, last but not least, the advertising agencies and large individual advertisers.
Each number of a great journal which appears today is a marvel of economic division of labor, capitalistic organization, and mechanical technique; it is an instrument of intellectual and economic intercourse, in which the potencies of all other instruments of commerce—the railway, the post, the telegraph, and the telephone—are united as in a focus.
D. IMITATION
1. Definition of Imitation[146]
The term "imitation" is used in ordinary language to designate any repetition of any act or thought which has been noted by an observer. Thus one imitates the facial expression of another, or his mode of speech. The term has been brought into prominence in scientific discussions through the work of Gabriel Tarde, who in his Les lois de l'imitation points out that imitation is a fundamental fact underlying all social development. The customs of society are imitated from generation to generation. The fashions of the day are imitated by large groups of people without any consciousness of the social solidarity which is derived from this common mode of behavior. There is developed through these various forms of imitation a body of experiences which is common to all of the members of a given social group. In complex society the various imitations which tend to set themselves up are frequently found to be in conflict; thus the tendency toward elaborate fashions in dress is constantly limited by the counter-tendency toward simpler fashions. The conflict of tendencies leads to individual variations from the example offered at any given time, and, as a result, there are new examples to be followed. Complex social examples are thus products of conflict.
This general doctrine of Tarde has been elaborated by a number of recent writers. Royce calls attention to the fundamental importance of imitation as a means of social inheritance. The same doctrine is taken up by Baldwin in his Mental Development in the Child and Race, and in Social and Ethical Interpretations. With these later writers, imitation takes on a significance which is somewhat technical and broader than the significance which it has either with Tarde or in the ordinary use of the term. Baldwin uses the term to cover that case in which an individual repeats an act because he has himself gone through the act. In such a case one imitates himself and sets up what Baldwin terms a circular reaction. The principle of imitation is thus introduced into individual psychology as well as into general social psychology, and the relation between the individual's acts and his own imagery is brought under the same general principle as the individual's responses to his social environment. The term "imitation" in this broader sense is closely related to the processes of sympathy.