To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic
of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say,
nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt
an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the
transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in
sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve
contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand
wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to
these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the
excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his
local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a
sharer in the universal uneasiness. It might be worth while to inquire
what effect this exciting accumulation of the news of the world upon an
individual or a community has upon happiness and upon character. Is the
New England man any better able to bear or deal with his extraordinary
climate by the daily knowledge of the weather all over the globe? Is a
man happier, or improved in character, by the woful tale of a world's
distress and apprehension that greets him every morning at breakfast?
Knowledge, we know, increases sorrow; but I suppose the offset to that
is, that strength only comes through suffering.
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