The Newspaper Press Is One Of The Most Extraordinary Features In The
United States.
Its influence is omnipresent.
Every party in religion,
politics, or morals, speaks, not by one, but by fifty organs; and every
nicely defined shade of opinion has its voices also. Every town of large
size has from ten to twenty daily papers; every village has its three or
four; and even a collection of huts produces its one "daily," or two or
three "weeklies." These prints start into existence without any fiscal
restrictions: there is neither stamp nor paper duty. Newspapers are not a
luxury, as with us, but a necessary of life. They vary in price from one
halfpenny to threepence, and no workman who could afford his daily bread
would think of being without his paper. Hundreds of them are sold in the
hotels at breakfast-time; and in every steamer and railway car, from the
Atlantic ocean to the western prairies, the traveller is assailed by
newsboys with dozens of them for sale. They are bought in hundreds
everywhere, and are greedily devoured by men, women, and children. Almost
as soon as the locality of a town is chosen, a paper starts into life,
which always has the effect of creating an antagonist.
The newspapers in the large cities spare no expense in obtaining, either
by telegraph or otherwise, the earliest intelligence of all that goes on
in the world. Every item of English news appears in the journals, from the
movements of the court to those of the literati; and a weekly summary of
parliamentary intelligence is always given.
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