Nobodies.

Judging from the daily papers, one would infer that the great mass of the people in this community, or in this Commonwealth, are nobodies, and that only a small percentage of our population is of actual account. A lot of leading politicians who contrive to hold all the offices and run the government for the anonymous millions of their fellow-citizens,— these people are somebodies. The daily papers are full of their movements, sayings and doings. When they die, column or two are devoted a to their biographies and obituaries. We are told how “smart” they were, and how sumptuously they lived at the public expense. A short time ago “Horace Gray” was the current topic of the obsequious and laundry press for days, until one became slightly bored with it, and refused to peruse articles, paragraphs, and despatches [sic] devoted to it. Newspaper readers were fairly surfeited with “Horace Gray.” A great many people about us are daily entering the mists of death, who scarcely get a mere mention in the newspaper press, whose departures, indeed, do not create a ripple. But let two or three prominent lawyers, judges, or governors shuffle off the mortal coil of life, and straightway we learn that a gloom overspreads our entire community. We poor devils of survivors, who are nobodies, mere anonymous rubbish, are told that we are bereaved, orphaned, and left without salaried guides, because the Hon. So-and-So has ceased to draw his quarterly stipend from the treasury of the city or Commonwealth, and the Hon. X. Y. will no more travel at the national expense to Washington to represent us in Congress. It turns out that most of these famous men of the newspapers were and are “pushing” people. Then, again, the death of a prominent man is a real godsend to the newspapers, of which they make the most by spreading it over as much space as possible. Indeed, every incident and every notorious individual are magnified and dilated by the press out of all proportion to its or his importance. The advent of the long-haired, poetic lunatic, or “crank,” known as Oscar Wilde, upon our shores is discussed by the press as if it was an event of first-rate importance. In this way the press is doing all it can to confound the public judgement and render it incapable of just discrimination.

B.