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deep, entirely psychological and cordial? I am afraid it would be a delusion to think so. Owing to the
increasingly urban nature of our civilization and because the number of our friends and acquaintances
does not cease to grow while their degree of intimacy decreases, what we have to say or write is
addressed less and less to isolated individuals, and more and more to ever larger groups. Our real
interlocuter, our real correspondent is, and more so each day, the Public. 9 It is, therefore, not
completely surprising that printed announcements, 10 and advertisements in newspapers, increase
much more rapidly than private letters. Perhaps we even have the right to think it probable that these
latter, the familiar, chatty letters, which must be distinguished from business letters, continue to
diminish in number and still more in length, to judge by the extraordinary simplification and
abbreviation even of love letters appearing in the “personal correspondence” section of certain
newspapers. 11 The utilitarian terseness of telegrams and telephone conversations, which are
trespassing on the domains of correspondence, has repercussions on the style of even the most
intimate letters. Invaded by the press from one side, by the telegraph and the telephone from the other,
preyed upon on both sides at once, if correspondence still lives and even, according to postal
statistics, gives illusory signs of prosperity, it can only be because of the increase in business letters.
The personal letter, familiar and well developed, was killed by the newspaper. This is
understandable, since the newspaper is the superior equivalent of the letter, or rather its extension and
amplification, its universal dissemination. The newspaper does not have the same origins as the book.
Books come from speeches, from monologues, and especially from poems and songs. The book of
poetry preceded the book of prose; the sacred book preceded the profane. The origin of books is
lyrical and religious. But the origin of the newspaper is secular and familiar. It comes from the
private letter, which itself comes from conversation. Hence newspapers began as private letters
addressed to individuals and copied a certain number of times. . . .
The newspaper, in short, is a public letter, a public conversation, which is derived from private
letters and conversation and is becoming their great regulator and their most abundant nourishment,
uniform for everyone in the whole world, changing profoundly for everyone from one day to the next.
It began as only a prolonged echo of chats and correspondences and ended up as their almost
exclusive source. Correspondence still lives, more than ever, and especially in the most concentrated
and modern of its forms, the telegram. A private telegram addressed to the editor-in-chief results in a
sensational new story of intense immediacy, which will instantaneously arouse crowds in all the great
cities of the continent; from these dispersed crowds, in intimate though distant contact through their
consciousness of their simultaneity and their mutual action born of the action of the news story, the
newspaper will create an immense, abstract, and sovereign crowd, which it will name opinion. The
newspaper has thus finished the age-old work that conversation began, that correspondence extended,
but that always remained in a state of a sparse and scattered outline—the fusion of personal opinions
into local opinions, and this into national and world opinion, the grandiose unification of the public
mind. I say the public mind, not the national or the traditional mind, which remain basically distinct
despite the double invasion of this rational, serious internationalism, of which the national mind is
often no more than the popular echo and repercussion. This is an enormous power, one that can only
increase, because the need to agree with the public of which one is a part, to think and act in
agreement with opinion, becomes all the more strong and irresistible as the public becomes more
numerous, the opinion more imposing, and the need itself more often satisfied. One should thus not be
surprised to see our contemporaries so pliant before the wind of passing opinion, nor should one
conclude from this that characters have necessarily weakened. When poplars and oaks are brought
down by a storm, it is not because they grew weaker but because the wind grew stronger.