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A side issue, yet socially important, was the way in which the entire Lindbergh story emphasized the new "power of the press." As a molder of opinion on vital political issues, the newspapers may have almost ceased to function, but the development of press associations, of syndicates and of special writers has enabled them to take any outstanding event and bring thou- sands upon thousands of words upon it before the eyes of virtually every literate U. S. inhabitant. Who has not seen the Lindbergh photographs? Who, asked to whom the nicknames "Slim," "Lucky," apply, would hesitate for an answer? To be sure, the stories written about Colonel Lindbergh were often phrased in bombastic and maudlin journalese. Mrs. Lindbergh, dignified, poised, was the theme of countless prose variations of Mother Machree. Had Colonel Lindbergh possessed a wife or sweetheart, one hesitates to think what would have been written about her. What Colonel Lindbergh did and said at his various receptions was fogged in a cloud of superlatives and oratory. Mediocre speeches, inane songs* and wretched poetry shadowed him. But the fact remains that the newspapers have made an entire country as small and closely knit as a village. Usually it is the village bad boys and girls—erring corset salesmen, twisted sex victims, brawling cinema actors and actresses—who make the rest of the villagers sit up, rub eyes. But whether it is a good show or a bad show or a peep show, the newspapers have certainly brought the art of ballyhoo to new heights of volume and penetration. Through it all, the hero of the occasion has been, appropriately, the most heroic aspect of it. Never has his tongue or his balance slipped, always has he been what kindly old ladies might call "a real nice boy." Anyone might have said, as Colonel Lindbergh said at the performance of Rio Rita: "I won't keep you long; you'd rather see the show than listen to me." But few would have fulfilled that promise and sat down after a speech of hardly more than a moment's duration. And Colonel Lindbergh's con duct in Paris and in England must have done much to relieve the sore ness caused by tourists with franc-plastered trunks, by Mr. Tilden squabbling with linesmen and Mr. Hagen missing his appointments. With the Lindbergh episode al most over, cynics may rise to call his ovations "hysteria," his re ceptions "sensationalism run riot." But back of the torn paper and the screeching headlines lay a very sincere and very spontaneous out burst of popular emotion. There has been so much commercialism in everything of late — crimes of passion are accompanied by insurance policies and lithe-limbed athletes hold grandstand conferences. Here was one man who did some thing for motives other than there being "money in it," for it is hard ly sentimentalism to feel that Colonel Lindbergh did not cross the Atlantic with his mind focused on Mr. Orteig's $25,000. It was one instance in which the Dollar was not quite Almighty, of the Golden Age v. the Age of Gold.