"It caters to the public demand regardless of the spirit or the depravity behind it. 'Quatro! Quatro! Quatro!' is the burden of its cry, and for quatro it is willing to lead the world forward or backward, as the case may be. It has been growing in stature and retrograding in usefulness for fifty years throughout the world, in all save increasing facilities, and avidity for pandering to the worst and most uncivilized propensities of mankind, and it will probably continue to grow worse for a century to come.
"Fifty years ago it was blindly controversial, but there was enough of reason in its discussions to give hope for the future. Now it is a mere mental and moral refuse car, and its so-called religious form is devoted only to a more refined class of refuse, if that expression is allowable.
"As a whole, it represents classes and not the whole community; prejudices, and not principles; it advocates selfish, not general interests; it panders to petty jealousies; it indulges in tittle-tattle in mere wantonness, and has no aim save the grossly materialistic."
I winced under his fierce arraignment and invective, for I am a newspaper man myself.
"I know that I have touched you in a sensitive spot, but I speak of the newspaper in a general sense. There are worthy exceptions, despite all the untoward environments; but, unfortunately, their influence is limited. Your masses read and re-read accounts of how two beings beat each other out of human semblance on a wager, and pass, unread and unnoticed, the best thoughts of your greatest scientists and profoundest thinkers. It is not the canaille who do this alone, but your statesmen and rulers, men of large affairs and men of the learned professions."
I turned the conversation, saying:
"It is incomprehensible to me how you produced this record of events in so short a time and without apparent mechanical or physical effort."
"Doubtless, but not more incomprehensible to you than your linotype machines and perfecting press would have been to Gutenberg. And your discoveries and inventions would be no more incomprehensible to him than would his types and crude multiplying press be to the papyrus writers, scriveners and hieroglyphants of the earlier world.
"The transition from the work of the papyrians to the achievements of the Intermereans is the result of that evolution known as scientific research into Nature's beneficence, in which mechanical invention is a mere incident, and its application to a high, unselfish and noble purpose, instead of selfish, base and ignoble ends.
"We had outstripped your present ideals ages before the Chinese began block printing, or Gutenberg fashioned his types and press. Both these, as well as your own advanced mechanism, as well as your every other great achievement in science and research, were the result of the thought-seed sown or diffused from this land, but which fell on absolutely barren soil, or only grew in puny or defective forms, far short of ripening or maturity.