82 THE NEWSPAPER AGE. THE NEWSPAPER AGE.. BY PARSON QUILL. THERE may have been as much truth as poetry in the old fancy about the ages. The golden, silver, brazen, iron, are past, and nothing is left to us but the leaden age, unless this be combined with the fragments of all the others to make an amalgam age-the age of the printers' type. Well, let us be content with it. It is at least mightier than all the others. If in some respects the scale descends, in others, it ascends. The savage can pick up gold from the river's sands: let him have it, and farewell to the golden age. The roaming Spaniard can, as he seizes the shrub on the hill-side to support him from falling, pull up the soil that reveals the silver. Let him coin his pieces of eight from the mines of Potosi, and we will not envy him his silver age. The Chinese may pride himself on his brass or copper coin, but the age of gong, cymbal and tamtam is little to our taste. Iron belongs to the age of the warrior, verging into that which produces the ploughshare, the anvil, the saw, the hammer. It introduces us merely to the physical aspects of civilized life. It is for us to boast the age of lead, or amalgam, the last and greatest of all. If it were given me to select a symbol for successive periods of time, I would take the bow and arrow for one, the sword for another, the parchment, or the Gothic structure, or the feudal castle, for another; but in taking the newspaper for our own, there would be no room to mistake the age to which it belonged. It is a new power that has just appeared upon the stage. If the cowled monk represents the middle ages, the steel-clad knight the age of chivalry, I would bid the painter place upon the canvas, as representative of the nineteenth century, a man with a newspaper in his hand, with a printing-press worked by steam in the background. Editors supersede generals, and the knight of the quill is mightier than the knight of the sword. The Alexanders and Wellingtons of to-day fight the battles of empire by marshalling types instead of men. Take up the newspaper, and look at it. It tells you that ours is a cosmopolitan age. It mirrors the tastes of its readers, and yet it is a printed map of the world. It is the daguerreotype of the human race of to-day. There is an account of a battle in the Black Sea, of an insurrection in China, of our fleet entering a harbor of Japan, of a project for uniting the Atlantic to the Pacific with iron bands of commerce, of debates in Congress, and of the fire in your own neighborhood, whose alarm broke your slumbers last night. What a singular compilation of intelligence! And yet, whether from near or far, it concerns you. You expect to find it there. You read it. And just so it is with every other reader. That newspaper suggests strange ideas of the world's progress. Italy and Hungary are our neighbors. Bedini and Bassi are no fictions or abstractions. We have a property in the virtues or the vices of others, and they in ours. Nations are but branches of one great family, and all are brethren. But take another glance at the newspaper. It is a mirror of ourselves. Our own character is reflected in it. It shows our virtues and vices, our capacities and our neglect. It tells you that we are a people that love amusements. Here are panoramas and concerts, theatres and lyceums, hippodromes and prize-fights. Here are columns of the Liturgy of Mammon, the God of Wall street. We are very respectful to his Majesty, the dollar. This scrap of inked paper has more still than this to say. It tells you that we stand sadly in need of something like a Maine Law, in its records of assaults, and burglaries, and murders, and trials. If I was to make a temperance speech in the Legislature, I am not sure but I would hold up a daily paper, and say, "Ho! ye law makers, read this; it is more expressive than my poor eloqueuce." But read further. You see our capacities and means for selfimprovement, unparalleled in all previous time; schools, colleges, seminaries, churches. Here is the picture painted by type of our commerce and legislation, of the tastes we cherish, the morals we cultivate, the books we read, the men we choose for rulers, the topics that agitate the popular mind, the character and influence of this nation as bearing on others, suggesting corresponding duties. The old Sybil's leaves, with all their prophecies, were not half so significant as that folded sheet dropped every morning before the poor man's door. Thus is the newspaper a mirror in which the age may look and see its own features, and know itself. The difficulty is, that most look into it as the beauty does into the glass-not to detect faults, but to feed a selfish pride. Their curiosity is greater than their power of reflection. But the newspaper has in itself a vast significance. Little did Benjamin Franklin even think, about a century ago, of what the periodical press was so soon to become; certainly he could scarcely THE NEWSPAPER AGE. have imagined it, when nothing as yet existed of it but the feeble germ which his own hands had helped to plant; and his good mother-in-law hesitated to give her daughter to the printer, because there were already two printing-offices in the colonies, and she was not sure that the country could support them. And now what is the printing-press! It is a new element of civilization and progress introduced among the nations, a third estate in the legislation of the world. How busy it is, with its steam breath and iron nerves, working day and night, never complaining, never wearysending out its winged thoughts, light almost as a snow-flake, yet striking blows that ring on the anvil where a nation's character is shaped; scattering its weekly if not daily messages, that they may give back an echo from even the most distant dwelling of the wilderness; flooding us with books, periodicals, pamphlets, newspapers; making everybody's business ours, and ours everybody's; saving us much time and trouble in doing what the Athenians did that characteristic of an actively thinking and doing nationthe always hearing or telling of some new thing. If it slanders, it does it with a thousand mouths at once. If it harangues, the printing-press is even a taller stump than that they cut in the land beyond the Hoosiers. If it circulates the punch-bowl of humor, in all probability the company drink nearly in concert around the globe, and beyond the Mississippi there are sideshakings responsive to those beyond the Ganges. If it reads divinity, its learned audience outnumbers Princeton or New Haven by thousands. If it turns politician, office-holders acknowledge with gratitude its bread-and-butter eloquence, or translate its editorials as Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. When it thunders, Niagara sinks to a whisper at its roar. It comes as near as possible to our ideal of a human Omnipresence. How the very heavens would be darkened if we could see all over the land the unfolded sheets as they fall at every man's door! The distant log-cabin which sunset finds under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, must have its newspaper. A man must read what the printer says before he can cast his vote. Would that it were not quite so often the printer's devil that says it! But with all its power for good when used aright, God forbid that we should vindicate it in all it does! It seems to be emancipated from the sentence of Christ on men, Ye cannot serve God and mammon. It works for truth and falsehood, for God and the Devil too. It prints Bibles and 883 novels, good books and bad books. It is the organ of purity and the organ of corruption. It is a type of the powers of the age, all of them to be vigilantly watched. Freedom makes it her sentinel, and Despotism her tool. And see what a short century has made of it. In 1754 it was but little in advance of what it was when in Venice the gazetta coin coined the word gazette while it paid for its hearing. In 1724 there were in England three daily, eight weekly, and ten evening papers three times a week. In this country there were at the most but one or two. Now what is England?-what the United States? Ours is a land of newspapers. Our literature for the most part is a newspaper literature. In the poor man's home you see but few books, perhaps, but the newspaper lies on the table, and that is his library. The printing capital of the world is enormous, and it has sprung into existence for the most part within the last fifty years. Men now living can remember the infancy of newspaper literature. But who can measure its power to-day? Thousands of presses are ever busy to tell us what is doing in the world-to spread before us the panorama of the present time. All civilized lands are at once blessed and cursed by the printingpress. Cabinets and regencies tremble at it. Autocrats denounce it, and Popes excommunicate it. But it will not shrink from the prisons of one or be awed by the bulls of the other. Even in the heart of Mohammedanism, it is correcting Omar's blunder in burning the Alexandrian Library. In India and China it is flinging off Christian tracts by the million of pages, and Mandarins and Brahmins are forced to employ it in self-defence. Who would have dreamed of this that had seen the "English Mercury," now lying in the British Museum, dated July 28, 1588, as it came from the press? But of one thing the newspaper is a perpetual remembrancer. It refutes the falsehood, that we are or can be isolated among the nations-that we are to think and act and legislate for ourselves alone. We belong to the community of the world. We are a portion of the great family of man, and all our highest interests are common. Take up the newspaper. It is the creature of the popular taste. It is just what our circumstances and wants and passions make it. It is true to the facts and relations of our existence. Open it and read. What meets your eye? Party conflicts and arguments, it is true; the doings of legislation and the proceedings of our courts of justice and social organizations-railroad projects 84 THE NEWSPAPER AGE. them to the stranger-the age when each nation shut out all others from access to its colonieswhen Spain, in the bigotry of folly, forbade the export of gold that poured in like a flood from the New World, and, contemning the principles of justice as well as of political economy, grew poor while she hoarded-the age when feeble communities, struggling against unjust power, were left to be crushed in detail, without aid or sympathy-all these have passed away and will never come again. Every sheet that falls from the press, whatever else it may be, is their obituary notice. There is a consolidation of nations, a community of interests, that binds them together. Strive against it as any may, the time is coming when citizenship will have a cosmopolitan significance. As each county belongs to the State, and each State to the Union, so each nation will be a member of the world's great confederacy, and the whole globe will be one commonwealth. The peculiarities of national law and usage will in great measure melt away. The exclusiveness of customs and privileges will grow obsolete. Even now, no nation can claim its great men for itself alone. Commerce and the printing-press forbid the exclusive appropriation. Every free land shares with us our Washington. Milton wrote as well as thought for all time. But the period must come when the earnest actor and thinker need not wait for the grass to grow green over his grave, before his name is a household word in every latitude, and Wall street experience. But something || themselves successfully, and forbid to impart more. There you read of Russia and Turkey, England and France, Austria and Hungary, India and Japan, Persia and China, Mexico and Brazil, Australia and the islands of the sea. Why They are all our neighbors now. Their circumstances concern us. Their interests are ours. The claims of man, larger than those of community or of native land, demand our notice. Commerce and the progress of the age and our common hopes, as well as the principles of a true Christianity, forbid our isolation. The newspaper gives us foreign intelligence simply because it has ceased to be foreign, because it concerns us, because the race is one. The "tongue of the Egyptian sea is destroyed." The river is smitten in its seven streams, and men go over dry-shod. The barriers of empire are breaking down. The Chinese walls of selfish nationality are giving way. The whole race has common relations and common interests. An American citizen in Austrian dungeons is a man whose humanity must be vindicated, or we are traitors to our trust of freedom. An unfriended exile on the shores of the Mediterranean implores the protection of our flag, and the shield of the whole power of the American Union, if need be, shall be thrown around him. Japan, closed for centuries against foreign commerce, can play the hermit no longer. It is too late for nations to immure themselves in convents and monasteries. The force of things compels England to abandon the obsolete notions of protection, and open her ports to the free commerce of the world. The wilderness is becoming a village, the village a city, the nation but a neighborhood. Every thing proclaims the brotherhood of man, and that it will be vain to deny it much longer. In this age of newspapers the Russian Autocrat. must stand like the meanest criminal at the bar of public opinion. Wars may no longer be proclaimed in jest or a freak of passion. The Duke of Tuscany's prisons are the talk of nations. Oppression the world over is the mountain iceberg around which the fogs of darkness hang, but the lightnings flash out its epitaph. It will melt away. It cannot long remain alive to all around it. The laws of national progress, of advancing civilization, of a world-spreading morality, certify its doom. It is as vain to resist the decree as to bid the seasons pause, or the sun forget to shine. The age when Egyptian priests hid their light under a bushel, and held the monopoly of learning-the age when nations could strive to keep their arts and discoveries to in and China and Egypt will claim him as a kins- The newspaper, then, apart from the facts it communicates, has a moral significance. It is full of suggestions of duty. It bids us enlarge our views to the measure of our duties to a world. It bids us look beyond the present, and fashion out a future worthy of our hopes. A PHILOSOPHER.-James Ferguson and his wife led a cat-and-dog life, and she is not once alluded to in the philosopher's autobiography. About the year 1750, one evening, while he was delivering to a London audience a lecture on astronomy, his wife entered the room in a passion, and maliciously overturned several pieces of apparatus; when all the notice Ferguson took of the catastrophe was the observation to his audience, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have the misfortune to be married to this woman." WE ALL DO FADE AS A LEAF. HAVE you never been struck, reader, by the evident resemblance between the various appearances of nature and the various states of the human mind, as well as the successive stages of human life? If not, reflect on it, and you will find it interesting. We can easily conceive how the Divine Being might have created a perpetual variance between our condition and the state of nature around us. When he pronounced the earth accursed "for our sakes," he might have aggravated that curse, by surrounding us to a painful extent with immitigable same ness. He might have reduced the large variety of animal tribes to the few which we use for food; and have left us no quadruped to please us with its gambols-no insect to sport in the summer's sun--no birds to delight us with their flight and their song. He might have taken away all the beauty of the landscape, by commanding the hill to sink and the valley to rise to a perfect level-by sinking the torrent and the rivulet beneath the surface of the earth-and by substituting for the towering and luxuriant tree nothing but the thorn and the brier. And from this scene he might have commanded the moon and the stars to withdraw their light, and have permitted the sun to have looked upon it only through a cloud. And had the face of nature worn an aspect so dreary, he doubtless would have counted himself most happy, or rather least miserable, who could have secluded himself most effectually from beholding it. But so far from being surrounded by such a scene, Paradise was not more adapted to man in his state of primeval purity, than the present condition of nature corresponds with our altered circumstances. We know not to what extent the fall of man affected the original constitution of nature. In the poetic eye of Milton, "Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal sin Original," But this, more than poetically correct, was only a presage of approaching revolution. From the tenor of the curse, we learn that a material change, never to be revoked, immediately followed. Nor do we know the effects produced by the universal deluge, and by other convulsions of nature. But whatever they may have been, we find ourselves the passing 85 inhabitants of a world where nature, animate and inanimate, seems to sympathize with our lot, to point out our duties, and to remind us of our end. Nature, in this light, is only a grand depository of means intended to promote the end of our being. It is a temple in which piety finds herself surrounded by a thousand emanations from the Supreme, and addressed by a thousand voices of warning and encouragement. The poet has drawn from it his most pathetic images-the moralist many of his best arguments and examples and the prophet some of his most arousing monitions. How often is the restlessness of man compared to the constant agitation of the ocean; and the uncertainty of friendship, and of success in life, to the instability of that element. How beautifully does the setting of the unclouded sun illustrate the closing scene of the Christian's life; how friendly the calm and twilight of evening are to solitude and meditation; and how aptly the rage of a storm represents the frequent turbulence of human passions! If life be compared to a day, it has its morning, its noon, its evening, and its night; and when compared with the year, it has its "flowering spring,” its “summer's ardent strength," its "Sober autumn fading into age; And pale concluding winter comes at last The change continually passing upon every thing around us, can scarcely fail to remind even the most thoughtless that such, "in his best estate," is man. But it is an unwelcome subject to the majority of mankind, and often remanded, like Paul by Felix, until a more convenient season shall have arrived. It cannot, however, be dismissed at present on account of its unseasonableness, for scarcely can we walk out without being reminded of it by some striking emblem. The warmth of summer is gone, and the freshness of the grass. The tribes of insects have gradually disappeared, and those which Providence instructs to provide for the winter, have begun to live on the fruit of their industry. The trees have lost the beauty and luxuriance of their foliage; for while some of them are already left naked to the blast, the leaves which remain on the rest have become sere and yellow, and every breath of air diminishes their number. The birds are become silent, and the sun leaves us in darkness early in the day. Here then is a silent but an eloquent appeal to our hearts, and surely no one can be offended when nature itself becomes the in GOD IN HISTORY. structor. Had we, by any possibility, been ignorant that all the preceding generations of men had died, and that the same event awaited us, who could go out and contemplate those images of desolation without wondering whether a change would ever take place in our condition, answering to this change in the aspect of nature! But this is not a subject of conjecture--we know that it is the lot of all, and nature only aims to remind us of it. We are too much disposed to act as though the winter of our life would never come. But nature addresses us in the tone of warning, and assures us that it will; and presents itself as an example. We are so far absorbed in the present concerns of life, that we are in extreme danger of forgetting what awaits us at the end. But, as if to prevent this fatal inattention, nature dies before our eyes. It prospectively celebrates our funeral; and while the funeral procession is passing before us, the voice of wisdom pronounces, in solemn accents, "We all do fade as a leaf." Damascus blades the olden Magyar drew, With trenchant arm, and battles won; Let tyrant princes know the time's not far- Thou thing of death! a freeman gave thee form- Before the majesty of right. O sword! help me record this sacred vow- Let flow of soul and feast of banquet-hall, My sword! proud gift of plumed and patriot band, With thee some day will seek my native land, KOSSUTH TO HIS SWORD. BY HORACE DRESSER, ESQ., NEW YORK: ["I swear here before you (raising the sword to heaven) that this American sword in my hand shall be always faithful in the cause of Freedom-that it shall be ever foremost in the battle, and that it shall never be polluted by ambition or cowardice."-M. KOSSUTH, at Castle Garden.] HENCEFORTH with me thou art, bright blade of steel! I swear, O sword! I'll smite the potentate I seem to hear, beside old Danube's wave, GOD IN HISTORY. THE ruins of kingdoms- the relics of mighty empires that were- the overthrow or decay of the master works of man, are, of all objects that enter the mind, the most afflicting. The highwrought perfection of beauty and art seem born but to perish; and decay is seen and felt to be an inherent law of their being. But such is the nature of man, that even while gazing upon the relics of unknown nations which have survived all history, he forgets his own perishable nation in the spectacle of enduring greatness. We know of no spectacle so well calculated to teach human humiliation, and convince us of the utter fragility of the proudest monuments of art, as the relics which remind us of vast populations that have passed from the earth, and the empires that have crumbled into ruins. We read upon their ruins of the past the fate of the present. We feel as if all the cities of men were built on foundations beneath which the earthquake slept, and that we abide in the midst of the same doom which has already swallowed so much of the records of mortal magnificence. Under such emotions we look on all human power as foundationless, and view the proudest nations of the present as covered only with the mask of their desolation. The Assyrian empire was once alike the terror and wonder of the world, and Babylon was perhaps never surpassed in power and gorgeous |