Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/790

When one is living quite on the other side of the world, the United States tend to merge into a unit. One thinks largely in terms of national integers, of which the United States is one. Like a historian of the old school or a writer of diplomatic notes, one conceives of what the United States is doing about this or that. It is taken, as schoolmen say, as an entity. Then one happens to receive a newspaper from one of the smaller towns, from any town, that is, smaller than New York—and sometimes Chicago. Then one gets a momentary shock. One is brought back to earth. And the earth is just what it used to be. It is a loose collection of houses, of streets, of neighbourhoods, villages, farms, towns. Each of these has an intense consciousness of what is going on within itself in the way of fires, burglaries, murders, family jars, weddings, and banquets to esteemed fellow citizens, and a languid drooping interest in the rest of the spacious land.

Very provincial? No, not at all. Just local, just human, just at home, just where they live. Of course, the paper has the Associated Press service or some other service of which it brags. As a newspaper which knows its business, it prints "national" news, and strives assiduously for "national" advertisements, making much on provocation of its "national" circulation. But somehow all this wears a thin and apologetic air. The very style of the national news reminds one of his childhood text-book in history, or of the cyclopaedia that he is sometimes regretfully obliged to consult. Let us have this over as soon as possible and get to something interesting, it all seems to say. How different the local news. Even in the most woodenly treated item there is flavour, even if only of the desire to say something and still avoid a libel suit.

Yet there is a strange phenomenon noted. These same papers that fairly shriek with localisms devote a discreet amount of space to the activities of various Americanization agencies. From time to time, with a marked air of doing their duty, there are earnest editorials on the importance of Americanization and the wickedness