I. — THE “TIMES” ON AMERICAN AFFAIRS.

INDISCUSSINGTHE causes of the Crimean war, Mr. Kinglake gives a prominent place to the agency of the Times. He does not decide whether the Times was the master or the slave of the British people, whether it prompted their decisions, or merely divined them by a happy instinct The coincidence of sentiment between the Times and common sentiment is explicable on either hypothesis. A story, however, is related by Mr. Kinglake, which, if it is to be accepted as authentic, would tend to clear up the mystery. The Times, he says, used to employ a shrewd, idle clergyman, whose duty was to hang about in places of public resort, to listen neither to the pre-eminently foolish nor to the pre-eminently wise, but to wait till some common and obvious thought was repeated in many places by many average men all unacquainted with each other. That thought was the prize he sought for, and brought home to his employers. Once in possession of this knowledge, they again employed able writers to enforce this opinion by arguments certain to fall upon willing ears. The Times was meanwhile regarded by ordinary men and women as a mysterious entity, a concrete embodiment of the power known in the abstract as “public opinion.” As Mr. Kinglake says, men prefixed to its name such adjectives as showed “that they regarded the subject of their comments in the light of an active sentient being, having a life beyond the span of mortal men, gifted with reason, armed with a cruel strength, endued with some of the darkest of human passions, but clearly “liable hereafter to the direst penalty of sin.” They supposed it, I may add, to be in possession of a political knowledge profounder than the knowledge of any private individual, if not than the knowledge of statesmen, and acquiesced in its arrogating the right of speaking in the name of the English people.

It is, however, notorious that no part of the power wielded by the Times is derived from any respect for its consistency or its unselfish advocacy of principles. And this follows naturally if we accept as substantially accurate the account given by Mr. Kinglake of the process by which its opinions are determined. A thought common to the great mass of the educated English classes must in all cases be a tolerably obvious one: if it refers to domestic matters which are familiar in all their bearings to the majority of educated men, it will probably be marked by shrewd commonsense; when thousands of Englishmen agree in thinking that the suffrage is unfairly distributed, or that trade is oppressively taxed, they are probably right. Their opinions are, at least, the result of an operation which may, without a palpable misnomer, be described as thought. In such cases, the Times, in concentrating their opinions into one focus, will adopt a policy which, if not resting upon very exalted considerations, is at least dictated by homely good sense, and not marked by utter ignorance. But the case is widely different when we come to foreign politics. English ignorance in such matters is proverbial. The name of America five years ago called up to the ordinary English mind nothing but a vague cluster of associations, compounded of Mrs. Trollope, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A few flying reminiscences of disputes about territory, and a few commonplaces about democracy, made up what we were pleased to call our opinions. Most people were as ignorant of American history since the revolution as of the history of the Chinese empire, and of American geography as of the geography of Central Africa. Our utterances on American affairs might have the external form of judgment; they were, in substance, mere random assertions about unknown quantities. Now, the Times, by the law of its being, would have to be the mere echo of these sham decisions. The honest British public confidently laid down the law, like a Dogberry giving judgment in a Chancery suit, and the Times stood by as a skilful reporter to dress its blundering dogmas in the language of political philosophy. The British public talked about “Yankee snobbishness;” theTimes translated its words into solemn nothings about “American democracy,” and the public thought it had said rather a good thing.

I wish to trace some of the consequences of this peculiar process, by which a newspaper transmutes our rubbish into a kind of Britannia metal, and obtains our sympathy because we have ourselves provided the raw material, and our admiration because it is worked up into such sparkling tinsel. The very first necessity for this dexterous shuffling is an affectation of absolute infallibility; a true account of the Times would run like Prince Henry’s description of Poins, “Thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks, never a man’s thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine.” But it would never suit our modern Poins to be praised for merely keeping the roadway; he must be credited with also pointing it out; and, to substantiate his claims of guiding the English people instead of merely divining the path which they will take, he must naturally affect more than mortal wisdom. His claim to be followed is that he is a