large as at present in the United States.” How far present-day tendencies have borne out Mr. Child’s expectation of a growing and accepted public interest in important industrial enterprises, the reader can judge for himself.
With regard to the second tendency—the increased readiness of the public to expect information about and to be heard on matters of political and social interest—Ray Stannard Baker’s description of the American journalist at the Peace Conference of Versailles gives an excellent picture. Mr. Baker tells what a shock American newspaper men gave Old World diplomats because at the Paris conference they “had come, not begging, but demanding. They sat at every doorway,” says Mr. Baker. “They looked over every shoulder. They wanted every resolution and report and wanted it immediately. I shall never forget the delegation of American newspaper men, led by John Nevin, I saw come striding through that Holy of Holies, the French Foreign Office, demanding that they be admitted to the first general session of the Peace Conference. They horrified the upholders of the old methods, they desperately offended the ancient conventions, they were as rough and direct as democracy itself.”
And I shall never forget the same feeling brought home to me, when Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World, in the press room at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, led the discussion of the newspaper representatives who forced the conference to regard public opinion and admit newspaper men, and give out communiques daily.
That the pressure of the public for admittance to the mysteries of foreign affairs is being felt by the nations of the world may be seen from the following dispatch published in the New York Herald under the date line of the New York Herald Bureau, Paris, January 17, 1922: “The success of Lord Riddell in getting publicity for British opinion during the Washington conference, while the French viewpoint was not stressed,