TALMAGE AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER.

Kumara Times, Issue 773, 22 March 1879, Page 2

TALMAGE AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER.

Dr De Witt Talmage, the well-known American preacher, has recently been delivering a series of discourses on New York City Life, being the result of midnight rambles to all parts of that great city accompanied by two police officers. He thus describes his visit to the daily newspapers:—

Hastening on up a few blocks, we came where on the right side, we saw large establishments ablaze from foundation to capstone. These were the great printing-houses of the New York dailies. We went in. We went up from editorial rooms to type setters’ and proof-readers’ loft. These are the foundries where the great thunderbolts of public opinion are forged. How the pens scratched ! How the types clicked ! How. the wheels rushed all the world’s news rolling over the cylinder like Niagara at Table Rock. Great torrents of opinion, and crimes, of accidents, of destroyed reputations, of avenged character. Who can estimate the mightiness for good or evil of a daily newspaper 1 Fingers of steel picking of! the end of telegraph wire facts of

religion and philosophy and science, and information from the four winds of heaven I In 1850 the Associated Press began to pay 200,000 dole, a year for news, some of the individual sheets paying 50,000 dols. extra for despatches. Some of them, independent of the Associated Press, with a wire cake gathering up sheaves of news from all the great harvest-fields of the world. It is high time that good men understood that the printing press is the mightiest engine of all the centuries. The high* water mark of the printers type-case shows the ebb or flow of the great ocetiiii<| tides of civilisation or Christianity Just think of it! In 1835 ait the daily newspapers of New York issued but 10,000 copies, Now there are 500,000, and taking the ordinary calculation that five people read the newspaper,' two million five hundred thousand people read the newspapers of New York ! I once could not understand' how the Bible statement, could he? true that “nations should be be born in a day.” T can understand it now. Get* the telegraph operators and editdM con verted, and in twenty four Honrs the whole earth will hear the salvation call. Nothing more impmssed me in 4 he, night exploration than the press. . ,Biit it is carried on with oh I what aching eyes, and what exhaustion of health, t did not find more than one niau out of ten who had anything like brawny health, in the great newspaper establishments of New York. The nlal odour of the ink, however complete the ventilation ; the necessity of toiling at the hours when God has drawn the curtaiti of the night for natural sleep ; the; pressure of daily publication breaks down ; the temptation of intoxicating stimulants in order to keep the* nervous energy up, a temption whiph only the strongest can resist—all these; make newspaper life something to besympathised with. Do not begrud&l the three or five cents you give for the newspaper. Yon buy not only intelligence with that, but you help to pky for sleepless nights, and smarting r eye-* balls, and racked brain, and early sepulchre.