Any open-minded inquirer into the relations between the press and public opinion in this country will be met at the threshold by a series of paradoxes. The evidence offered him is sharply conflicting, even radically contradictory. Newspapers are all-powerful. They are also completely impotent. The press is at once dreaded and despised, dismissed as negligible at the same time that it is fawned upon. Men in public life will at one moment make every effort to get, in the French phrase, a “bonne presse,” for themselves and their measures but at the next will rail at newspaper opposition as a thing at which they may snap their fingers. Their opinion of the futility of the press, it may be noted, is usually intensified, if not originally provoked, by their ceasing to stand high in its good graces.