Because
that machinery is far from perfect, the umpire's life is often a
distracted one. Many crucial plays he has to judge by eye. The last
vestige of dispute could be taken out of the game, as it has been
taken out of chess when people obey the rules, if somebody thought it
worth his while to photograph every play. It was the moving pictures
which finally settled a real doubt in many reporters' minds, owing to
the slowness of the human eye, as to just what blow of Dempsey's
knocked out Carpentier.
Wherever there is a good machinery of record, the modern news service
works with great precision. There is one on the stock exchange, and
the news of price movements is flashed over tickers with dependable
accuracy. There is a machinery for election returns, and when the
counting and tabulating are well done, the result of a national
election is usually known on the night of the election. In civilized
communities deaths, births, marriages and divorces are recorded, and
are known accurately except where there is concealment or neglect. The
machinery exists for some, and only some, aspects of industry and
government, in varying degrees of precision for securities, money and
staples, bank clearances, realty transactions, wage scales. It exists
for imports and exports because they pass through a custom house and
can be directly recorded. It exists in nothing like the same degree
for internal trade, and especially for trade over the counter.
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