newspapers have "always been esteemed of so much importance to the public, as the best means of disseminating intelligence among the people, that the lowest rate has always been afforded for the purpose of encouraging their circulation." The telegraph quickly weakened this center-margin pattern and, more important, by intensifying the volume of news, it greatly weakened the role of editorial opinions. News has steadily overtaken views as a shaper of public attitudes, though few examples of this change are quite so striking as the sudden growth of the Florence Nightingale image in the British world. And yet nothing has been more misunderstood than the power of the telegraph in this matter. Perhaps the most decisive feature is this. The natural dynamic of the book and, also, newspaper is to create a unified national outlook on a centralized pattern. All literate people, therefore, experience a desire for an extension of the most enlightened opinions in a uniform horizontal and homogeneous pattern to the "most backward areas," and to the least literate minds. The telegraph ended that hope. It decentralized the newspaper world so thoroughly that uniform national views were quite impossible, even before the Civil War. Perhaps an even more important consequence of the telegraph was that in America the literary talent was drawn into journalism, rather than into the book medium. Poe and Twain and Hemingway are examples of writers who could find neither training nor outlet save through the newspaper. In Europe, on the other hand, the numerous small national groups presented a discontinuous mosaic that the telegraph merely intensified. The result was that the telegraph in Europe strengthened the position of the book, and forced even the press to assume a literary character. Not least of the developments since the telegraph has been the weather forecast, perhaps the most popularly participative of all the human interest items in the daily press. In the early days of telegraph, rain created problems in the grounding of wires. These problems drew attention to weather dynamics. One report