The Press—Its Future

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THE PRESS—ITS FUTURE.

Surely it is no more than fair that journalists, whose business it is to record other people’s fortunes and to chant other people’s praises, should occasionally devote a paragraph or two to themselves and their profession. The meekest and most modest of men, (and such the members of the guild proverbially are,) have their moments of complacent meditation in which to review the past and to look inquiringly into the future. And we really do not know what profession has a better right, in view of the great advances it has made of late years, to indulge in a little innocent boasting.

Some of our elder readers may remember what newspapers were thirty years ago. In the city they were dull, dreary sheets, containing a little stale news and commenting prosily thereon, without a spark of life or enterprise about them, only fit for retired merchants to doze over, or gossiping old maids to peruse with the sole object of hunting up a fresh marriage or death. In the country they were still worse. Little, dingy sheets, containing hardly anything but advertisements, their conductors imagined they were doing all that was required of them if they scissored out a half-column from the metropolitan papers and chronicled the details of a big pumpkin or a three-legged cow at home. The readers of those days were easily contented and what would now scarcely be tolerated for a moment, in those times was thought quite passable.

But what a change at present! The difference between “now” and “then” was never so palpably demonstrated. The introduction of the magnetic telegraph and the invention of lightning presses have made the press the institution par excellence, of the day. What was once deemed a luxury, and a somewhat superfluous one at that, is now a matter of necessity no more to be dispensed with than one’s breakfast. The man who don’t read the papers has become obsolete. Newspapers have become the mirror of the world, without looking into which, no one can accomplish anything. The great daily journals have a department for all. The business man glances anxiously at his own corner of the sheet to mark the quotations of stock or the fluctuations of trade; the litterateur turns to his own particular column for reviews or announcements of new books; the people who are anxious about absent friends to their appropriate department; the unemployed to the columns of wants; and everybody to the telegraphic head, which is glanced at as anxiously each morning by millions of readers as though it contained the fate of each.

But what newspapers are, at present, is comparatively nothing to what they are destined to be. With the increase of mechanical facilities the labor of producing them will be greatly lessened, and with the spread of intelligence among the masses there will spring up a far greater demand for news journals than at present. When the Atlantic Telegraph¹ is an accomplished fact, as it will be in the end, (for who ever knew one of our indomitable race to abandon an enterprise unachieved?) we shall behold the daily press a complete reflex of current events in all countries, and its readers, sitting comfortably at their matutinal coffee, may realize the prophetic words of the man “who was for all time” and “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.”

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