more independent.

Further the mass of men, though there was more intelligent reading
(and writing, for that matter) than there is to-day, had not acquired
the habit of daily reading.

It may be doubted whether even to-day the mass of men (in the sense of
the actual majority of adult citizens) have done so. But what I mean
is that in the time of which I speak (the earlier part, and a portion
of the middle, of the nineteenth century), there was no reading of
papers as a regular habit by those who work with their hands. The
papers were still in the main written for those who had leisure; those
who for the most part had some travel, and those who had a smattering,
at least, of the Humanities.

The matter appearing in the newspapers was often _written by_ men of
less facilities. But the people who wrote them, wrote them under the
knowledge that their audience was of the sort I describe. To this day
in the healthy remnant of our old State, in the country villages, much
of this tradition survives. The country folk in my own neighbourhood
can read as well as I can; but they prefer to talk among themselves
when they are at leisure, or, at the most, to seize in a few moments
the main items of news about the war; they prefer this, I say, as a
habit of mind, to the poring over square yards of printed matter which
(especially in the Sunday papers) are now food for their fellows in
the town. That is because in the country a man has true neighbours,
whereas the towns are a dust of isolated beings, mentally (and often
physically) starved.