The tabloid journals flourishing today are at once a subway commonplace and a surface enigma. In the current Nation, Silas Bent undertakes to analyze their status and, after some purely journalistic comment, reaches this conclusion: the tabloids have discovered a new public. For, these new papers, easy to handle, to read, to look at, have run, in the city of New York for example, into a circulation of one and one quarter million copies without having proselyted from the older dailies, even considering retarded progress as well as actual impairment, more than one hundred thousand purchasers.

Clearly the new dailies have found a new public and have published as plainly as their own type and omnipresent cuts, the propensities of more than a million formerly uninterpreted people. And it is the unique character of their public that gives these tabloids an uncertain significance. If they were engaged in converting to their standard readers long inured to fine print, one would have little hesitation in condemning them. But they seem to be catering to other readers, hitherto up served, and thus to assume besides the vices of time-servers and the virtues of discoverers.

The new public is an urban public. In all probability statistics would prove it a laboring, largely foreign, and almost wholly an uneducated public. From the more certain evidence afforded by the contents and wide circulation of the new journals, it appears to be a public relishing news of a domestic nature, editorials couched in simple sentences and expressing the precepts of simpletons, and, above all, pictures illustrating stories of comprehensible disgrace or honor. It finds equal and not different attraction in moral turpitude and mundano triumph; on the one hand, robberv murder, and divorce; on the other, limerick contests, daring rescues, and political coups.

Although they have undoubtedly added moral and social simple-mindedness to political chicanery, long the besetting sin of journalism, the tabloids have, nevertheless, demonstrated that there is a "Main Street" on Third Avenue. Where Gopher Prairie gobbled private gossip, the Bowery relishes public scandal. Among the millions most unfortunately herded in cities, the starved minds fed by the new press are the literate leaders. It is in part their grotesque reflection in the picture papers that gives shape to the apprehensions of "The New Barbarians" and truth to the pessimism of "The Phantom Public".