VOL. IX EDITED BY HOLBROOK JACKSON W ITH this Number, TO-DAY completes its fifth year. We are not afraid of showing pride in the achievement, all the more so as the use of the "first person plural” is deliberate and not, on this occasion, the traditional editorial symbol. We are a team. We include Contributors, Readers, and, equally important, Advertisers. Without the willing and enthusiastic co-operation of each of these the Editor could not have proceeded very far or have ar ived anywhere. With their co-operation, TO-DAY has become an established fact. We have not deviated an iota from our original policy. Our guiding motto was and is : The best is nearly good enough for us. Unique in format, companionable in size, and rich with the work of a fair proportion of the most excellent of living writers, TO-DAY has every reason to be proud of its niche and to face the future with confidence. The past five years have seen our establishment. The years to come will be years of growth. O UR fifth birthday is not to pass unheeded. It has been decided to celebrate the event with a little dinner. It will be the First To-DAY Dinner and a wish (which has its echo in the editorial bosom) has been expressed that the celebration may be repeated annually. Here, then, are the particulars. On April 4th next the TO-DAY DINNER will take place at the Florence Restaurant, Rupert Street, W., at 7 for 7.30 P.M. The Editor will preside, supported by Mr. John Drinkwater, Mr. Ralph Hodgson, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Cecil Roberts, Mr. R. A. Foster-Melliar, Mr. Francis Bickley, and other contributors, and as many readers as the room will hold. The capacity of the room is 100. The price of the Dinner ticket is 6s. 6d. Applications for tickets should be made to the Editor, To-Day, 10 Adam Street, Adelphi, London, W.C. 2, by post at once. A Seats will be allotted in strict rotation. Ladies are, of course, invited. From steps already taken and intimations already received, the first TO-DAY DINNER promises to be not only a success but an event of no little interest. The Editor looks forward to meeting many of his readers round the table and of raising a glass with them to the health of the magazine of which they have shown so keen an appreciation. An account of the proceedings will appear in our next number. S INCE our last number went to press, one of our oldest and most regular contributors, Canon Frederick Langbridge, has passed away at the age of seventy-three. His charming essays have given pleasure to many. They reflected a genial and witty personality, wide experience of men, and a brain, not only cultured, but rich with bookish memories. Canon Langbridge wore his scholarship with grace and humour. His satire was keen but humane and his sense of fun overflowing and indomitable. To the larger public he is known as joint-author of that most popular of all Dickensian plays, The Only Way; but to the readers of TO-DAY he must ever remain the gracious essayist—a fragrant memory. I, Two Players By SIEGFRIED SASSOON Fumbling a few dim smouldering chords that die... And you, Lost in a fool serenade of romance, memorizing. Then out of the past, my dream of the past that we knew, I THE PASSING OF THE NEWSPAPER By HOLBROOK JACKSON S the era of the newspaper passing away? There were indications of decay in the ten years preceding the war. All was not well with the popular press and the more astute of the Lords of Fleet Street were already busy devising ways and means of meeting the change in popular taste. Pictures took the place of reading matter, and where the text was permitted to survive, it was cunningly broken up into paragraphs and served with so many apéritifs in the form of headlines, cross headings, displayed titles, italicised or heavy-faced introductions and epitomes, insets, panels, box-rules and all the other ingenuities known to printing craft and editorial cunning, that the printed page looked as attractive and seemed as easy as the picture page. Public apathy, however, was not arrested. The effort of reading even short paragraphs emasculated of all thought was too much, and so the camera came into its own. The last twenty years have witnessed the gradual erosion of print by the encroachment of pictures. One by one the oldfashioned pictureless newspapers are being submerged or converted. Recent casualties include The Standard, The Globe, The St. James's Gazette, and the (evening) Westminster Gazette; and it has been asserted on high authority that few if any of the survivors are paying their way, let alone making a profit. Desperate efforts have been made at compromise. Most daily and evening papers admit pictures into their texts and several have pages devoted entirely to pictures. Pictures have even crept into the austere columns of The Times. As a further indication of the popular preference the only successful newspaper innovations of the past two decades have been The Daily Mirror and The Daily Sketch and their sabbatarian prototypes The Sunday Pictorial and The Sunday Herald. interesting to note that the first of these picture papers was the result of the recovery from an error in judgment on the part of It is Viscount Northcliffe, the greatest manufacturer of newspapers in the world. The Daily Mirror began as a dignified newspaper for women, but after the utter failure of the first few numbers to attract readers, Lord Northcliffe translated his unlucky venture into the familiar picture paper which to-day boasts two million "readers "-mostly, I am informed, women! Thus, in retrieving the fortunes of an unwanted newspaper, a new era for the press was inaugurated. The Daily Mirror, like the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the law of gravitation, was the result of an accident. But even the picture-paper may have its day. It is already hard-pressed by the picture-theatre. At the moment, albeit, it is more than holding its own. The world and his wife, and even their children, are rapidly abandoning their newfound art of reading as they revel in pictures-printed or "movie" or both. Who can tell what the future may hold? The Daily Mirror may yet be superseded by the Pathé Gazette; our Northcliffes and Rothermeres and Hultons be ousted by the Gaumonts yet to be; and as news is translated into views, the centre of opinion moved from Fleet Street to Soho ! News and views are otherwise related. Views are not only pictures-views are also opinions; and if pictures are gradually supplanting letterpress, opinions are giving the coup de grâce to the old familiar news paragraphs. Yes, the devolution of our old friend the newspaper is going on before our eyes as we revert once more to the age of pamphlets. The Great War which has changed so many things made this transition easier. On August 4, 1914, the last day of the past, the waning appetite for general news expired in a fierce hunger for war news. All the stock-in-trade of Fleet Street was consumed in the European conflagration. It might never have been; it was torpedoed in a moment-sunk without trace. The full-flavoured murders; the succulent divorce cases; the breathless breach of promise actions (O those six hundred love letters !); the burglaries and perjuries; frauds; assaults and batteries; the fires and floods and earthquakes; shipwrecks and collisions; the successes and failures, births and |