Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1881 — THE NEWSPAPER PRESS. [ARTICLE]

THE NEWSPAPER PRESS.

Pictures in the Hifalutm Language of Talmage. Talmage preached a characteristic seimon last Sunday on the subject The Newspaper Press. He took one text from Ezekiel x, 12: “And all the wheels have eyes.” Haid Talmage : Wheels full of eye*,? What but the wheels of the newspaper printing press? Other wheels are blind. They roll ou, pulling or crushing. The manufacturer’s -wheel, how it grinds the operator with fatigue, and rolls over nerve and muscle and bone and heart, not knowing what it does. Every moment of every hour of every day of every month of every year, there are hundreds of thousands of wheels of mechanism, wheels of enterprise, wheels of hard work in motion, but they are lifeless. Not so the wheels cf the printing press. Their entire business is to look and report- They are full of optic nerves, from axle to periphery. They are like those spokeu of by Eztkiel as full of eyes. Sharp eyes, near sigbted, lar sighted. They look up. They look down. Tbev look lar away. They take in the next street anil the next hemisphere. Eyes of criticism, eyes of investigation; eyes that twinkle with mirth, eyes glowering with indignation, eyes tender with love; eyes of suspicion, eyes ot hope; blue eyes, black eyes, green eyes; holy avee, evil eyes, sore eyes, political eyes, literafy eyes, historical eyes, religious eyes 5 ; eyes that see everything. “Aud the wheels were full of eyes.” Here tbe great divine utilized another text: Acts xviii, 21: “For all the Athenians and strangers which weie there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” Rue in my second text is the world’s cry for the newspaper. Paul describes a class of people in Athens w r ho spent their time either in gathering the news or telling it. Why especially in Athens? Because the more intelligent people become, the more inquisitive they ar<?—not about sihall things, but greut things. The question then most frequently is the question now most frequently asked. What is news? Tu answer that cry in the text for the newspaper the centuries have put their wits to work. China first succeeded, and has at Pekin a newspaper that lias been printed every week for one thousand years, printed on silk. Rome succeeded by publishing the Acta Diurua, in the same column putting fires, murders, marriages and tempests. Frauce succeeded by a physician wiitiug out the news of the day for his patients. England succeeded under Que.eu Elizabeth m first publishing the news of the Spanish Armada, aud going ou untilshe had enough enterprise, when the battle of Waterloo was fought, deciding the destiug of Europe, to give it one-third of a column in the London Moriiing.Chronicle, about as much as the newspaper of our day gives of a small fire. America succeeded, by Benjamin Karris’ first weekly paper, called Public Occurrences, published iu Boston in 1890, and by the first daily, tbe American Advertiser, published iu Philadelphia iu 1784. The newspaper did not suddenly spring upon the world, but came gradually. The genealogical line of the newspaper is this: The Adam of the race was a circular or news-let!er created by Divine impulse in human nature; aud the circular begat the pamphlet, and the pamphlet begat the quarterly, aud the quarterly begat the weekly, and the w eekly begat the semi weekly, aud the semi-weekly begat the daily. But alas, by what a struggle it came to its present development! No sooner had its power been demonstrated than tyranny and superstition snackled it. There is nothing that despotism so fears and hates as a printing press. It has too eyes’ in its wheel. The Russian empire, which is, considering all things, the most cruel despotism on earth, to-day keeps it under most jealous espionage. A great writer declared that the king of Naples made it unsafe for him to write of anything but natural history. Austria could not endure Kossuth’s journalistic pen pleading for the redemption of Hungary. Napoleon 1., trying to keep his iron heel on the neck of nations, said: “Editors are regents of sovereigns and the tutors of nations, and are only fit for prison.” But the battle for the freedom of the press was fought in the court rooms of England aud America aud decided before the this century began by Hamilton’B eloquent plea lor J. Peter Zenger’s Gazette in America, and Erskine’s advocacy of the freedom to publish Paine’s Rights of Man in England. These were the Marathon and Thermopylae in which the freedom of.tbe press was established in the Uuited States and Great Britain, ami all the powers of earth and hell will never again be able to put on the handcuffs and honples of literary and political despotism.