of the press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly
or unfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have
more zeal than knowledge in it.


X.

Whether the newspapers will become the rivals of the magazines as
the vehicle of literature is a matter that still remains in doubt
with the careful observer, after a decade of the newspaper
syndicate. Our daily papers never had the habit of the
feuilleton as those of the European continent have it; they
followed the English tradition in this, though they departed from
it in so many other things; and it was not till the Sunday
editions of the great dailies arose that there was any real hope
for the serial in the papers. I suspect that it was the vast
demand for material in their pages--twelve, eighteen,
twenty-four, thirty-six--that created the syndicate, for it was
the necessity of the Sunday edition not only to have material in
abundance, but, with all possible regard for quality, to have it
cheap; and the syndicate, when it came into being, imagined a
means of meeting this want. It sold the same material to as many
newspapers as it could for simultaneous publication in their
Sunday editions, which had each its special field, and did not
compete with another.

I do not think the syndicate began with serials, and I do not
think it is likely to end with them. It has rather worked the
vein of interviews, personal adventure, popular science, useful
information, travel, sketches, and short stories. Still it has