A man reading a political editorial is usually in the minds of men who set out to discuss the relation between “The Press and Public Opinion.” “Does it convince him,” they ask. The issue is broader, as broad as the consciousness of society. Without a common consciousness in regard to the fact and event of the day, shared by individuals, but known together and at once, public opinion, in the modern sense, could not exist. The opinion and action of modern society in all its various forms and channels rests on the possession by the individuals who make up society of a common body of knowledge and fact supplied day by day in the newspaper. If the individuals who make up the social organism did not have this common daily knowledge of a common body of fact which each knows is in common, they could not feel, think or act together any more than the individual can have conscious feeling, thought and action without the light of consciousness to enable him to act. This common consciousness of society the newspaper creates. The street and market-place do something, the public meeting does more, the book, weekly and monthly, go a step farther to bring people to think the same things about the republic, and on all the issues of society, but the daily newspaper does more than all the rest put together. The reason why the news in a newspaper counts is not because news is recorded there. All news, social, political, criminal, has other records. Newspaper news is news and not daily annals, because it is read by great masses. Every reader knows that all other readers are in the same light of facts, chronicled with more or less accuracy it may be, but still read by all and known by all. In the light of this common consciousness, common opinion develops and the relation of the opinion-making part of a newspaper, the editorial, to the making of opinion rests on the fact that it enters on the field of common public consciousness at the very moment that event and issue are calling for opinions, decision and action. The editorial is perpetually weighed and estimated as if it were something said by one man to another man or the page of a book read by successive readers, when its real weight lies in the vast mass who for an instant read it when the news is before them and they are aware that their attention is the conscious attention of all the readers of which they are a part.