one kind of pavement as on another. There will no longer be querulous demands on inventors for the devising of a perfect shoe, because it will be clearly seen that this perfect shoe has been furnished already by nature, and that it is only human ignorance and conceit which has marred the work of God. We may now look back with some feeling of envious regret on the wiser, because more natural methods of the ancient world; and future generations wil look back with feelings of simple wonderment at the infatuation which could submit without a struggle to a system which doomed the horse to unnecessary disease and agony and to a premature death, while it deprived his owner of wealth often sorely needed or his own welfare and that of all depending on him. Of the ultimate issue there can be no doubt; but it is still the duty of "Free Lance," as all of whose eyes are opened to the mischiefs of the existing system, to fight the battle to the end.-SIR GEORGE W. Cox, in Fraser's Magazine.

THE NEWSPAPER.*

I THINK there can be no doubt that the most potent power for good or evil in our period of modern life is the newspaper. In countries that take to a monarchy it is the real king, and in republics like this of ours it is the real president, and citizens and subjects alike look to it for inspiration and direction, as few of them, I imagine, ever look to the Lord.

The newspaper is also the most remarkable outcome of our modern civilization. I know of no one thing beside that has gathered into itself so faithfully the very essence of the invention and discovery which has made the last hundred years peerless in this respect over all that went before, or which employs so much of the finest power to-day in the thought and life of man.

The steam engine does no day's work so marvelous in its whole result as that which is done by the steam printing press, the wire flashes no such weight of interest, the railroad carries no such freight as its last edition, while the artist has no such opening be side as this that transfers his work at once to the block and then sends his pictures flying into the hearts and homes of a million men. I went once into the northwestern wilderness after trout and came to a log house, where we halted for a chat, and the good woman told us that the ladies of our party were the first white women she had seen for almost two years. It was a very pretty place, and

*A sermon preached at the Church of the Messiah, New York, Dec. 5, 1880, Daniel, 11-32, 33: This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his middle of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part iron and part clay.”

was full of rosy children, and this was to be noted, that she had covered her walls carefully and with a fine taste with pictures from our great papers, so that the children were living in a sort of art gallery, which brought the great world home to them in a very charming fashion. I was driven by a thunderstorm into another log house some years after among the Rocky Mountains, and here was the same sight: a capital farmer's wife, a house full of children and the walls of the living room just like those in Grand Traverse-a picture gallery of our thought and life and land.

A

"How do you manage to find your faces," I said once to an artist who has taken a first place on these papers. "I know the real men, but these others who are born of your hand and brain seem to be as genuine and true to the life as the rest, Then I mentioned one I had just seen as an instance, and said: "Is that an ideal portrait?” "No," he answered, with a smile; "that is just as real as those of the men you know. I hunted all over New York for that man's face, and found it in a saloon." Hogarth, you will remember, did this in his day, and so his pictures are photographs of life in the London of his age. But the modern newspaper prints such pictures, and instead of confining them to the portfolios of the curious and the print shops of the capitals, it sends them over the prairies and into the backwoods on their messages of good or evil, and to do their work for those who can make no more of a printed page than they can of Sanskrit and the old runes, as well as for those who can blend the thoughts and the pictures into one. And as the newspaper makes tributary to its purpose the finest result of art and science and discovery, so it captures some of the choicest framers in our current thought and life. Dr. Chalmers said many years ago that the best writing and a good deal of the best thinking of his day was done for the newspapers. It was a perfect wonder to him how such essays as he read in them every day could be written on the spur of the moment, in the clash and clang of the intensest life of the world, and when each question which came up for discussion had been sprung there and then on the writer. It is not too much to say that the newspaper articles are as much better now than they were then as the papers are on which Chalmers based his wonder. It is the result of this devouring enterprise, fed by ample means which searches through every corner and cranny of the land for men and women of the finest ability, and then fastens them with chains of gold, as the old masters of the world did to their own place in the triumphal procession, but with this distinction between the old captains and the new, that in our day they are apt to be proud and glad, as most ministers are, for that matter, in proportion to the weight of the chains. And not content with the best thought, the newspaper at the same time secures the choicest enterprise. Do the hidden forces break out in an earthquake, a man springs up with his note-book and pencil while the land is rocking under his feet, and

begins to write and to flash his words over the first wire he can lay his hands on. Is the fire burning up a city, there he is among the flames scratching at his paper, the coolest man you shall find. "How did you come to write that account of that fearful morning in our city?" I said to a woman who had given a wonderful picture of it all in one of your great papers. "I was rushing out with all the rest of you," she said, "when I met a reporter for that paper who knew me; he said: You are the very person I was looking for; come right along. You must write me the story of this morning for our paper, and it must go over the wires to-day. We will pay you more than you ask. Write you the story?' I cried, through my tears; why, my heart is breaking, and I have lost my folks; and just look at me with the grime.' 'All right,' he answered; 'put the heart-break into the story. Leave your face to take care of itself, and let the folks seek you; now come along;' and come I did, across the river to a house where he found a table, put paper and pencil down, and so I did it, blotting the thing all over with my tears." Is there war far afield, the newspaper will give you news of the battles far ahead of anything the governments can get who are most deeply involved, and vastly more true as a rule. The reporter is there in the midst of the shot and shell, rides out of the battle in a way that would break most men's necks, tires down horse after horse if he must, and flashes his words with the very fire and smoke of the battle in them over sea and land to the editor's room. Nothing escapes this ever-present and all-present eye, or shall I say this power one can liken best to the trunk of the great creature of the forests, which can pick up a pin or wrench down a pine. It mirrors the great markets on one page and on the other tells you of an oyster supper in the basement of a church, and reports impartially a murder or a

sermon.

Does the old Lion roar over there in Europe, or the Bear growl, or the Eagle scream? You hear them all through this wonderful telephone of the newspaper. It brings to you the froth and foam on the chalice of our life, and reports the vast and awful movements which belong to all the centuries and are felt all round the world.

"It is the abstract and brief chronicle of the time, showing virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

So it is no great wonder, as you will see, that the newspaper should be about the most potent power we know of among visible things, or that fair-minded men should be glad for this power, and proud of it wherever it is held sacred to truth and virtue in a wide and true sense. I would venture to say also, that we, of all men, should be glad and proud of this power for good, because among newspapers of the first rank there are very few indeed that are not conducted in a broad and liberal spirit whenever they touch the great questions which belong especially to the pulpit. Indeed, I saw a paragraph

not very long ago which professed to give the bias or the belonging of the most eminent editors in this country, and it was something of a wonder to find what numbers of them were what we should call liberal, until I remembered how hard it must be to find a man of any other mind who can conduct a great paper, or conducting one, should not catch this spirit through his work of the broad Church.

Nor is this true only of these states. You would think that in a city like London, where tire roots of things must run down deep as the old red sandstone, there would be no room for such a spirit; there is not much room for the letter of heresy, as some call it, but there is a great deal of room for the spirit. Don't label your basket of seed, and Master John will not trouble you much any more about its nature. Shall I tell you a story? I was wandering about London one day, and came on a place from which vast numbers of publications flow perpetually; and looking at the place, with no idea of being known, a gentleman invited me in, told me as we sat in his office he was one of the firm, had heard me preach in an old meetinghouse near by, was himself a liberal, as they all were; but then, you see, we have to keep all this to ourselves, he said, and take care no bigotry, at the least, gets into our books, but that they shall all have something in them of a broad and liberal spirit. It is the truth about the great papers we print on this side of the water, when they touch religion at all it is in a wide and inclusive way. They give no quarter to religious bigotry on any side, or bitter and narrow dogmas. It seems as if the very substance out of which most of the men are made who create or stamp their image on a great journal holds within it this leaven of free thought that they can no more hide than they can hide their shadow as they stand in the sun.

It has come to pass once more that for all these reasons, and others I shall not name, the newspaper has come to be beyond all doubt more popular and more widely read in this country than the Bible, while no man has to make such a confession about it as quaint Master Fuller made about the lesson for the day: "Forgive me in this, that when I set myself this morning to read Thy Blessed Word, I first turned the leaf to see if it was a long chapter." You never turn the page in this spirit, of your paper, to see if it is a long chapter, or find your long-lost glasses in the folded sheets, while most men, I doubt not, are stirred by what they read there, as they are seldom stirred by the great Old Book; and the reason for this is that the newspaper comes right home and bears the thought and life of the world about us, caught on the wing, and transferred to the pages, throbbing with love and hate, with terror and joy, with life and death, and it is not distance now but nearness which brings enchant

ment.

If this, once more, was the whole sum and substance of the newspaper, one could want no better visitor in our homes, or supervisor of our schools and churches, no more impregnable citadel and ally

of a free government, and no finer helper to our whole human life than the daily and weekly press.

But the truth is, as we all know, that there is a divine, a human, and an imperial element in the newspaper, as there is in all things that have come, and do come, out of the heart and life of man. It is like this great image the king saw in his dream, whose brightness was excellent. The head is fine gold, the breast and arms silver, the middle brass, the legs iron, and the feet part iron and part clay. The newspaper is glorions and good at its highest and best, meaner as you reach downward, and when you get clear down to the lowest line, as mean as dirt. It is the old dream over again in this respect, also that these elements stand for something outside the image itself. For the power on the throne and the power behind the throne, for the actors and the audience, for those who fashion this marvel of our modern time, and those for whom they fashion it. The gold and silver, the brass and iron and mud are all found first in the people who make the form and substance of the newspaper possible, and then it is in those who make the press to please those they work for and from whom they expect a due reward. Powerful and wonderful as this creation is of our new day, it is the image of the people who are looking at it in hope, or fear, or admiration, or hate. It is like the church, the drama, congress, the senate, and the administration, an outcome first and then an income. Or, like the water which runs clear to the upper stories of our houses and great buildings (only it does not so run in New York, a proof that we have those among us who work, and plan, and pay for cleanness; and at its worst it is like the stagnant pools and marshes that turn to slime in the sun to breed pestilence and malaria, proof of the kinship to evil some people tolerate about them or create out of the slush and slime of their own nature. Now that the American press-for I speak of this especially that the American press should distance the world in enterprise is as natural as it is that we should do a hundred things beside that spring from our wide and free life. That it should be generally keen, bright, trenchant, quick and humorous in spots, is also natural because these are all qualities that lie within our free life also. That the leading articles in our papers should contrive to pack all the sense into half the space of the leaders in a paper like the London Times is also natural, because we live a hasty, fiery and impatient life, as different as possible from the slow and sure processes of the life in England; and so editors know very well that if they should give us a piece of their mind in two columns we should look at the long chapter, refuse to read it, and so not only frustrate their labor but stop our subscriptions, for we will no more abide long sermons in the press than we will in the pulpit. That we should have hundreds of personal and impersonal items about every thing of any interest, and every man and woman who happens to strike the public eye is also natural, because there is no such