THE NEWSPAPER.

Kumara Times, Issue 408, 16 January 1878, Page 4

THE NEWSPAPER.

. Necessity of necessities.—Here, now -we have it—the newspaper 1 Wonderful product of br»in and toil! One would think it should be dearly bought and highly prized, and yet it is the cheapest thing in the world. Five or ten ■cents will buy it. Two or three dollars "will bring it to your home every week in the year. And yet, strange to say, there are men "too poor to take a newspaper." They can pay five cents for a glass of beer, or 15 cents for an unknown composition, called a " cocktail." They can pay one dollar for a circus ticket or 50 cents for the theatre, "but they are too poor, to buy a newspaper !<—a newspaper, which is a ticket ©f admission to the Globe Theatre, whose dramas were written, by God himself, "whose scene-shifter is Time, and whose curtains are rung down by death!" It is not necessary to speak of the mighty responsibilities which necessarily attach . to the control of such a power in the land as the newspaper is to-day, nor to Sby that the editor who rightly appre-" liends the importance of his work must bring to it a reverent spirit and a constant care.- The humblest sheet in the land goes in some homes as the only j authoritative messenger from the world ! outside; its opinions are accepted as j truth, and its suggestions have the force of law. The editor stands on the widest pulpit ever known in modern society. The lawyer has a narrow sphare before him; the Senator and the Representative—the walls hedge in their voices; the minister has the parish walls about the church. But there is a pulpit that now has no limit—it is the Press. It is, literally, the voice of one -that cries in the wilderness ! for all across the populous land the papers speak; and there is not in modern civilization a place of power that can compare with this. Rev. De "Witt Talmuge onGe said :—" In the clanking of the printing < press, as sheets fly out, I the voice of the Lord Almighty, proclaiming- to ajl the dead nations of tntßear^B 1 , come forth ? and to the retreating surges of darkness,' Let %re be-light?" *"