LOOKING RACK.

Evening Star, Issue 4069, 11 March 1876, Page 1 (Supplement)

LOOKING RACK.

One of the events of the publishing season : is the reprint of the ‘ Times’s * annual summaries for the last twenty-five years in a volume of 600 closely-printed pages. If in 1851, when these summaries began, the writer had been told that such materials for history Would exist in 1876, and that they would then be “ set” in type by. a machine worked wholly by boys, that they would be printed from no type at all on a press of miniature dimensions compared with the lumbering giants of his day, and almost automatic in its working, but producing from continuous rolls of paper huge perfected sheets of 128 pages each at the rate of 12,000 an hour, and that these sheets would be sold in book form for Is, he would pfgbably have called to mind the paper duty and imperfect printing appliances of 1851,’ and depreciated prophecies which looked so much like exaggeration. Yet this book of 1876 ends with the following, brief and business-like announcement“ This volume of 698 pages has been set in type by four lads, working at two composing machines, in ten days pf eight hours, at the rate of 2,159 lines per day. It has been printed from stereotype plates, in perfected, sheets, each containing 128 pages, at the rate of 12,000 per hour, on the Walter Dress.” Sopm of these anniyil retrospects contain'matter, historically true no doubt, but reading strangely ‘ in our time. One cannot, for example, help contrasting the political apathy of 1876 with the excitement of 1866, when Mr Bright was talking at Manchester of “the possible contingency of a justifiable rebellion,” and subsequently ‘‘threatened parliament with the change of peaceable demonstrations into a display of force if re. distance to his demands were continued at the opening of the ensuing .session.” Ip December pf that year • ‘ grave hpprehen- ; aoiM wbfq apoused by a pqtwfc that ’pljVW : organised working societies ot iutfeiM to swob tbo Wftt-cnd in

procession,” their, leaders boastfully : esti- 1 mating their numbers at 200,000. The ao»' tual muster was only one-eighth of this estimate, aud we can now gauge the pretensions of these . men a. uttle more' accurately. In 1676 it maybe well to remember the financial collapse which occurred ten years ago, when Overend and Gurney failed with engagements amounting to L 19,000,000,. when the Bank/ pharter Act was suspended, and “ for some months after the panic English credit fell into entire repute on the Continent,"and the Foreign Office tried in vain to dissipate the prevailing suspicion there by issuing a circular explaining "the distinction between scarcity of money and insolvency.”— * Sheffield Daily Telegraph.*