place of the grand juries, the boards of guardians, the lunatic asylum boards, and the rest, and if the new creations are endowed with extended powers, as Mr. Chamberlain would apparently wish, it will be more of a scandal than ever, assuredly, if they as well as their predecessors should be, as he said in his famous speech at West Islington in June 1885, 'confronted, interfered with, controlled by, an English official appointed by a foreign Government and without a shadow or shade of representative authority,' and consequently it will be more urgently necessary than ever even in the interest of the new institutions, to put the matter no higher, that such a scandal should be prevented in the only way in which it can be avoided. But all this is saying, in other words, that Home Rule or national self-government will be the necessary complement of local self-government. And that is the simple truth. All roads, it is said, lead to Rome. Whatever is done in Irish affairs, or if nothing be done and stagnation be the order of the day, the Government of Ireland by means of a National Parliament and an Executive responsible to it becomes equally the inevitable solution of the Irish question.

J. E. REDMOND.

ART AND THE DAILY PAPER

No one can fail to notice the change that has been coming over the newspaper-a change that has culminated with the Jubilee. I do not mean to call attention to the fact that the editorial 'we' no longer leads a gullible public; the veil that hid an unimportant personality has been torn away, and even the man in the street now knows that the editorial 'we' is frequently not of as much value as his I say so.' Nor yet would I refer to the disappearance of the descriptive reporter, who never could describe anything but his own sensations, which were always the same on all occasions and never worth recording; or of the war correspondent, who would inform you of the most secret thought and complex plan of his Commanderin-Chief when he barely had enough intelligence to know upon which side he was fighting; or of the critics, mainly appointed to their posts because they were friends or relations of those in authority and nothing better could be found for them to do. Interesting as it might be to point out how to-day statesmen contribute the politics, authors and artists the reviews, while scientific men are glad to describe their inventions, I am concerned rather with another phase of newspaper work, of which very little has been said or is even known outside the offices-the illustration of the daily paper. It has come about very gradually until lately. But the Jubilee seems to have completed the change, almost all the dailies at the time having published illustrations. Even the Times blossomed out in colour with a supplement-made in Germany.

The printing of drawings in newspapers is no new thing, as Mr. Mason Jackson has explained in his History of the Illustrated Press. Indeed, the daily paper would always have been illustrated had this been possible. It is only within the last twenty-five years, however, that some of the difficulties in the way have been practically surmounted. The first illustrated daily which lived for any length of time was, as far as I know, the Daily Graphic of New York, and it was illustrated chiefly by photo- or some other sort of lithography. The second was the Daily Graphic of London. The first came to an end years ago; the second had, and even still has, no rivals in London in its own sphere. But being issued from the office of the

weekly Graphic, it only in the beginning roused the curiosity of the public as to the mechanical methods of its production. It is, in comparison with the other morning penny papers, small in size, and its illustrations are small too. It was not, therefore, until a little over two years ago, when the Daily Chronicle, one morning, suddenly appeared containing effective drawings of the size of those published in the weekly illustrated papers, that editors generally gave any thought at all to the subject; that is, to the present method of reproducing and printing drawings. Sixty years ago, and more, large woodengravings of important events were issued with the dailies, but either not printed in them or else not by the methods now employed. In America also illustration has been used for years, and it has been customary to refer with pride to the Sunday paper as the greatest and most glorious outcome of that greatest and most glorious country. However, like many another of my country's productions, it is a tour de force-a folio magazine. It is not printed, as a rule, on the same press as the daily newspaper; but when it is, one must remember that the American Sunday journal usually sells for 2 d., and not for a penny. Much, therefore, can be accomplished that is impossible here. The Pall Mall Gazette also, I believe, claims to be the pioneer of English daily illustrated journalism. But the claim cannot be maintained.

As I had the good fortune to see the greater part of the experiments that were made, it may be interesting if I describe the new movement from the start. It originated in the following fashion. I was asked to prepare for the Chronicle a series of drawings to illustrate the work of the County Council; a series of pictures of the parks, the gardens, the polytechnics, the fire and other departments which the Council had opened, built, or taken over. Though flattered by this offer, I felt at once that to accept it unreservedly was far beyond my powers; many of the subjects I should not have cared to draw, and at that time I had still everything to learn of the methods to be used for reproducing and printing the drawings. For I then knew nothing of the methods of producing the daily illustrated paper, save in theory. As the editor wished to keep his scheme to himself, it was not possible to consult the publishers of the Graphic, who, I have no doubt, would, from their vast practical experience, have furnished me much information, of which many people will say I am still in need. All these things considered, I realised that the selection of the illustrations, and the care of their mechanical reproduction, were almost as much as I could reasonably venture to undertake. The task was the easier for me, as I found in the proprietors, and all connected with the paper, the most valuable collaborators and the most enthusiastic experimenters.

Now, experimenting in newspaper printing is enormously expensive, very difficult, and extremely dangerous. A monthly magazine like

the Century, a weekly paper like the Graphic, or a book, is printed either from what is known as a stop cylinder, or a flat press, usually the finest illustrations on one side of the paper only at a time, at the rate of from a few hundred to, at the most, a very few thousand copies an hour. In order to get out an edition of a weekly paper or a magazine at a given date, a large number of presses must therefore be employed. To increase the speed of production, the number of presses must be increased. Time and expense are not spared. The illustrated portions of the Century go to press three months before they are issued, its illustrated contents are made up a year in advance. A daily paper is printed on a cylinder press, a rotary, a web machine, usually at the rate of about 20,000 copies an hour, entirely by one operation. The paper is made up' between ten o'clock in the evening and, at the very latest, two o'clock in the morning. The printing is done in an hour or two, and often up to the very last moment the editor does not know that some change will not have to be made, owing to important news coming in. Yet the paper must be ready for delivery between four and five in the morning, in order to be distributed. When the Chronicle began to print illustrations there were but three available presses, made by Robert Hoe & Co., the great manufacturers, in the office. In an office like that of De Vinne, the printer of the Century, where there are many stop cylinder machines (in some offices they are counted by hundreds), one press and the two or three men who run it can easily be secured at any time for the making of experiments, and the printing is done mainly in the daytime. In the Chronicle office, to make a single experiment the entire machinery had to be set going, the printers, who only came at twelve o'clock at night, had to be kept on in the daytime, after their night's work was done, as they alone understood the presses. The proprietors, in trying these experiments, risked breaking the press and losing probably their edition the next day-for them the gravest sort of risk, as must be seen.

The first thing to do, it seemed to me, as they had decided to make the trial, was to enlist the services of distinguished artists. While many of the sixpenny magazines, both in this country and America, have done their best to cheapen art and literature, whether knowingly or not, and while the same cheap commonplaceness is bound to triumph blatantly in the newspaper, it was worth while, I thought, to start, at any rate, with the work of distinguished artists, thus showing what could be done, even if afterwards things must be allowed to take their course. The drawings were made in pen and ink, the one exception being the etching contributed by Mr. Whistler. Zinc line blocks were then produced from them in the ordinary way. But here a difficulty arose. The designs by Mr. Whistler and Sir Edward Burne-Jones were too small to be effective on the page, the former's too delicate to print. Therefore, instead of following the

unalterable law of the photo-engraver, and reducing the illustrations, we enlarged them, and eventually both were printed several times the size that the artists drew them; a proof that work, which is good in itself, looks well no matter how much the reproduction varies in size from the original. These blocks and others were then stereotyped-that is, from the page of type containing the blocks a cast was made in ordinary stereotype metal. A stereotype is made for three reasons: first, to preserve the type; second, to get duplicates or casts of it in metal at once, so that it can be printed on several presses at the same time; and third, because the stereotype is shaped to fit the curved cylinder of the press, to which it is impossible to fasten the type itself. But when it came to printing the drawing from the stereotype, the result was disappointing. The grey lines, the fine lines, became huge black masses, and all the blacks in the original printed as greys. Experiment after experiment followed, but it was not until the stereotyper was in a rage, the printer in despair, not until the whole page had been reproduced by electrotyping in the fashion adopted for the finest magazines, that a satisfactory method was devised. The method finally adopted is this. The engraved block, or rather a blank plate of the same size, is placed in a page of type. A stereotype of this page is then made, and the original engraving, after the stereotype is bent to fit on the cylinder of the printing press, is fastened to the blank space. This bending constitutes the radical difference between rapid newspaper printing and the printing of fine books. A book is printed in sheets. The type and blocks from which it is printed, or the electrotypes, lie upon a flat bed, and the paper comes down flatly upon them, or is rolled over them, usually on one side only at a time, thus allowing greater care, and also permitting the ink to dry before the other side is printed. A newspaper is printed from one or more rolls of paper, each of enormous length. The paper is unwound by the machine from the roll, and passes at incredible speed over a series of cylinders the faces of which just touch each other. One cylinder carries the stereotype plate, and on the other the paper runs. Each cylinder contains two or more pages of each copy of the paper. When the sheet of paper has passed around all the cylinders, it is completely printed on both sides, and this is done in the fraction of a second. has only this: the paper is pasted together, and cut and folded and counted, and comes out perfect at the end; while a book or magazine has to be gathered, and then stitched up and bound-separate operations. Of course, by the Chronicle method, as many original engraved blocks have to be made as are wanted for the various presses. The difficulty was to bend them, and to attach them so that they would not come off when being printed at the rate of 20,000 an hour, for if they did, the press would be broken all to pieces. It is sufficient to say that the problem has been solved.