already progressing; and their position in their own community gave them a prospect of eventual affiliation with it. The effect of the concentration of influence in a small mill-owning and land-owning class upon the opposite pole of society was what, I should suppose, was exactly to be expected. I saw little snobbery in the place, and little fawning, but rather the most implacable enmity, on the part of the imported working population, toward the American masters. Great numbers of these operatives possessed votes, but by pitting the voters of one imported nationality against another— English against Irish, and Canadian-French against both-the American minority generally ruled the town politically without much trouble. The close combination of the mill-owners in industrial matters was answered by several labour unions, whose hostility to the masters was at least intense, if their cohesion was not as great as that of the ring of brothers, cousins, and old neighbours who stood above them. Thus this promising caste of farmers grown millmasters had very cleverly reproduced the most marked social conditions of industrial Europe, with an angry proletariat clamouring at their doors. Social details of the sort I have mentioned may not appear very important in themselves. They would be of importance, however, if, taken with other facts, they pointed to a prospect of an eventual triumph of a social arrangement founded on caste over a democratic impulse which had a highly favourable opportunity for its development. Caste questions form the theme of plays and romances, but they are seldom studied by economists. It seems to me that serious data concerning them are worthy of presentation. In America we concern ourselves much with the 'dangerous elements,' with anarchistic sentiments which are supposed to have been imported into our great cities from Europe, and hear much about the division of society into two great camps of rich and poor, a division which is supposed to rest on legislation which favours the rich; but we hear little about the perfectly voluntary growth of caste feeling, though I should count this really a more important matter, because more inveterate in human thought and much further beyond the reach of legislation. It is a thing which general prosperity does not check, but rather stimulates, by bringing a greater number of persons within the range of social ambition; the accumulation of even a small amount of wealth in a family kindles to white heat the desire for progression toward the charmed upper circle. And it is a thing which is so peculiarly voluntary, and apparently so inevitably the outgrowth of the organisation of society on the basis of the family, that the very people whom we hear vaguely lamenting the social stratification as contrary to the principles of the Fourth of July orations, are every day doing their utmost to assist it. Boston, Mass. JOSEPH EDGAR CHAMBERLIN. SOME REMINISCENCES OF ENGLISH JOURNALISM It is just forty years since I first entered the office of a daily newspaper, and with a boy's eager curiosity watched the various processes by which the sheet that fascinated me was produced. It was strictly as an amateur that I was ushered into that holy of holies in journalism, the editor's room. The newspaper bewitched me, and the one life that I thought worth living was that of the journalist. It followed, that some years before I was able to set my foot upon the first rung of the ladder of the press, I had begun to haunt newspaper offices in the fashion in which the stage-struck youth haunts the theatre, and thus it comes to pass that in placing on record some reminiscences of English journalism, I am able to recall at least two-thirds of the present reign. Only one who has witnessed the steady development of the newspaper press during forty years, and who has had opportunities of watching the process from the inside, can understand how enormous is the change, how astounding the increase in power, capacity and wealth that these forty years have witnessed in the British press. My daily newspaper of 1857 was the Northern Daily Express, which if not the first daily newspaper published in the English provinces, must certainly rank second in that notable category. Its price was a penny; it consisted of four pages, about the size of the Daily Mail, and it was looked upon by newspaper men generally as the freak of a madman. Nobody believed then that daily newspapers could be made to pay in provincial towns. Only the most sanguine believed that a penny newspaper could ever hold its own against its high-priced rivals. It is not my purpose to weary my readers with personal reminiscences or experiences, but a description of the office of the Northern Daily Express in the year 1857, when I first became an occasional contributor to its columns, will point the contrast between the daily paper then and now. The Express was published in Newcastle-on-Tyne, its office having been removed to that town from Darlington, where it was originally started in 1855 or 1856. Two rooms and a couple of cellars below them in a small dwelling-house in West Clayton Street provided all the accommodation that was required for the production of the paper.. In one of the cellars a number of compositors worked at their frames; in the other was the small single-cylinder machine on which the sheet was printed. In the back room above there were more compositors, whilst the only remaining apartment-the front room on the ground floor-was so contrived as to pay a double debt. During the daytime it served as a publishing and advertisement office; but at six o'clock precisely the clerks departed and their place was taken by the editorial staff. At one desk was seated the sub-editor, at another the editor; in a corner behind the little counter the 'reader' and his boy were engaged in their monotonous occupation, whilst the reporter found a place at the counter itself, and between the intervals of turning out 'copy' received late advertisements or sold stray copies of the paper to chance customers. The journalist accustomed to the vast buildings which now serve the purpose of offices for our daily newspapers will be able to appreciate the contrast between the old days and these. It was certainly a humble spot that little room in West Clayton Street, Newcastle-on-Tyne, where the editing of the Northern Daily Express in all its departments was carried on; yet no journalist can afford to despise it, for it was there that the penny daily newspaper of provincial England was really launched upon the world. Nor must it be supposed that because the workshop was a poor one the work itself was bad. The editor of those days was unquestionably a man of genius, and he could hold his own as a writer against any of his successors in the world of journalism. It was darkly rumoured among the hangers-on of the establishment that Mr. M- had been invited by the editor of the Times to accept a post as leader-writer on that great newspaper. Perhaps the story was not true; but, at least, it is certain that if he had accepted such a position Mr. Mwould not have disgraced it. His leaders, it is true, were very different from those which are now in vogue. He did not play the part of Jove and launch the thunderbolts of his dictatorial wrath against ambassadors and Cabinet ministers. A sense of the ridiculous, with which he was happily endowed, kept him from that particular kind of folly. When he wrote it was rather as the humorous philosopher, who watched the stream of life flowing past his feet and amused himself and his readers by pointing out some of the peculiarities and weaknesses of those who were struggling in the current. He generally began his leader with a story. It was almost always a good one. When you had read it you were in a good temper with the writer and quite disposed to acquiesce in the application' with which, after the manner of the preacher, he followed his text. It was very seldom that he wrote upon what might be called a red-hot subject. He made no attempt to keep pace with the telegraphic news even in those days, when telegrams themselves were not particularly expeditious. A subject a week old seemed to him to be 6 quite as good as one that had been flashed upon him within the hour. Nay, so completely did he differ from the journalist of to-day that he would lay a subject on one side for half a week at a stretch, in order that he might, as he expressed it, ' steep his mind in it' before he attempted to discuss it in public. When he did discuss it you had the work of a scholar, a humourist, and an original thinker, turned out with as much regard to form as to substance. My editor was, in short, an essayist who would have prospered in the times of Addison and Steele. As I think of him, and contrast his brilliant little dissertations, with their polished epigrams and sub-current of scholarship, with the rough and ready 'leading article' of 1897, I am filled with amazement-tinctured with regret. What leisure has the editor of to-day for wit or scholarship, or the mere polishing of phrases? In this my first newspaper office, and in the rival office in which a few years later I began my actual apprenticeship to journalism, the mechanical appliances in use differed wonderfully from those which are now employed in producing our daily newspapers. The machines upon which the impression of the day was printed turned off from 600 to 1,000 copies an hour, printed on one side only. Every sheet had therefore to be passed through the machine a second time, and the production of a large edition was practically impossible. It was considered a great thing when Mr. Hoe introduced to us his wonderful three, four, six, and even ten-feeder rotary machines, by which the number of copies that could be printed within the hour was multiplied tenfold. These machines are now as hopelessly out of date in the great newspaper offices as the old Napier press itself. Nevertheless one must always think of them as the most imposing of all the printing presses which have assisted in the advance of journalism. A great Hoe machine of thirty years ago was like a castle or a man-of-war. The vast size, the number of men and boys clustered upon its various stages and engaged in feeding or delivering, the roar and rush of its wheels and rollers, made a great impression upon those who saw it at work. It seemed at that time that human ingenuity had reached its highest point in the provision of a fastprinting newspaper press. 'Nothing can touch the Hoe!' was the exulting cry of newspaper managers in the sixties. Yet hardly had the seventies been ushered in before the Hoe was practically obsolete. A method of stereotyping the 'formes' of movable type had been discovered which could be applied even to such rapid work as that of the daily press. A clever Belgian, if I remember aright, had found a compound of metals which could be hardened from a state of absolute fluidity in a few moments, so that ten minutes after a casting had been taken it was possible to print from it. This stereotyping had several advantages. First, it made it possible to use more than one machine in printing the same sheet, so that by multiplying the machines the number of copies printed in the hour could be increased in the same ratio. Still more important, however, was the fact that the stereotype plate, being of solid metal, could be bent to any curve, and could thus be fitted upon a cylinder of any diameter. It was this which gave its real value to the process of stereotyping. A number of ingenious mechanicians, including Hoe himself, at once set to work to produce a printing machine of a new class, in which the stereotype plates should be made to revolve upon a roller at any rate of speed that might be desired. In a few years we had in succession the Walter, the Hoe, and the Victory web-printing machines, and it is by machines of this class that our daily newspapers are now produced. Without tormenting my readers with figures, I will explain what these machines can do. A 'reel' of paper, perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, is fed' into the machines with extraordinary rapidity; the machine prints it, cuts each successive copy of the paper from the long roll, folds it and delivers it complete at a rate varying from 15,000 to 20,000 copies an hour. Nor is this all. If the newspaper consists, say, of ten pages instead of eight, the additional two pages are printed simultaneously from another reel, and are inserted at their proper place and actually gummed into the newspaper by these marvellous machines without any diminution of the speed! The machine does it all, be it remembered. No human hand touches the paper whilst it is going through these processes. There is the blank roll of paper at one end of the machine, whilst at the other end the complete journal, with its burden of news and thought, is being delivered, folded as when it reaches your breakfast-table, at the rate of speed I have mentioned. When I became editor of the Leeds Mercury, in 1870, there was a stalwart old man still employed on that journal who in former days had pulled the hand-press upon which the whole impression of the paper was printed. Before I retired from my editorship, in 1887, four or five of these marvellous web-printing machines were required to do the work which, in his youth, this old man had accomplished by himself. Without the invention of these machines, and the means they afford for the unlimited multiplication of the printed copies of a newspaper within the shortest possible space of time, the newspaper press could never have attained its present position in the world. It is not, therefore, to the mere journalist that the credit for the expansion of modern journalism alone belongs. That credit must be shared with him by the mechanic and the engineer. Forty years ago, and even later, our newspapers, even the best of them, gave us the news of the day before yesterday. To-day it is with yesterday's news only that they concern themselves; whilst the evening newspapers, which in the last ten years have played so prominent a part in journalism, keep still closer in the race to flying Time, and deal only with the events of the last twelve hours. |