A Stranger's Words Are Passed On To The Tribe Quite Accurately; No Dirt Is Put Into His Mouth, And Where The Heralds Judge That It Would Be Better Not To Translate Certain Remarks They Courteously Explain Why.

It was always delightful to meet the reporters, for they were men interested in their land, with the keen, unselfish interest that one finds in young house-surgeons or civilians.

Thanks to the (Boer) war, many of them had reached out to the ends of our earth, and spoke of the sister nations as it did one good to hear. Consequently the interviews - which are as dreary for the reporter as the reported - often turned into pleasant and unpublished talks. One felt at every turn of the quick sentences to be dealing with made and trained players of the game - balanced men who believed in decencies not to be disregarded, confidences not to be violated, and honour not to be mocked. (This may explain what men and women have told me - that there is very little of the brutal domestic terrorism of the Press in Canada, and not much blackmailing.) They neither spat nor wriggled; they interpolated no juicy anecdotes of murder or theft among their acquaintance; and not once between either ocean did they or any other fellow-subjects volunteer that their country was 'law-abiding.'

You know the First Sign-post on the Great Main Road? 'When a Woman advertises that she is virtuous, a Man that he is a gentleman, a Community that it is loyal, or a Country that it is law-abiding - go the other way!'

Yet, while the men's talk was so good and new, their written word seemed to be cast in conventional, not to say old-fashioned, moulds. A quarter of a century ago a sub-editor, opening his mail, could identify the Melbourne Argus, the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Cape Times as far as he could see them. Even unheaded clippings from them declared their origin as a piece of hide betrays the beast that wore it. But he noticed then that Canadian journals left neither spoor nor scent - might have blown in from anywhere between thirty degrees of latitude - and had to be carefully identified by hand. To-day, the spacing, the headlines, the advertising of Canadian papers, the chessboard-like look of the open page which should be a daily beautiful study in black and white, the brittle pulp-paper, the machine-set type, are all as standardised as the railway cars of the Continent. Indeed, looking through a mass of Canadian journals is like trying to find one's own sleeper in a corridor train. Newspaper offices are among the most conservative organisations in the world; but surely after twenty-five years some changes might be permitted to creep in; some original convention of expression or assembly might be developed.

I drew up to this idea cautiously among a knot of fellow-craftsmen. 'You mean,' said one straight-eyed youth, 'that we are a back-number copying back-numbers?'

It was precisely what I did mean, so I made haste to deny it.

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