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