So it is that if any
of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we
have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of
Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always
supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large
whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading
millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a
year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere
indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and
splendid disinterestedness of the reader of _Pearson's Weekly_. He still
keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of
men--the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have
just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly
sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the
details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult
and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the
giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern
representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the
werewolf and the dog-headed men.
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