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the appeal is primarily to the passions, and statements are 'published' in order to influence public conduct, the power of the press attains its zenith. Any slight tendency of more reasonable folk to question the accuracy of sensational matter obviously designed to inflame the general mind is overborne by the common pulse of passion which sways them as members of a crowd. The terse, dogmatic, unqualified, and unverifiable cablegram is the most potent form of this emotional explosive: it purports to place the mind of the million in immediate and associated contact with the distant sensational event in such wise as to quench all cavil or question; its meaning, heightened and expanded through the sounding board of the press, settles down irresistibly upon the public mind. This is the ideal mode of suggestion – a short, sharp voice of mysterious authority acting simultaneously upon millions of minds whose interaction of passionate sympathy gives it speedy vogue in common talk, and implants it in the small stock of recently acquired impressions. Consideration of this process explains how a dramatic fiction thus implanted is able to survive the most complete exposure, even when the contradiction is conveyed through the same channel as the