Untitled

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume II, Issue 231, 2 October 1867, Page 3

At the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, held at Wills's Rooms on the 29th of June, the chairman (the Right'' Hon. W. E. Gladstone) made the following. remarks in reference to English journalism: —'I cannot but congratulate you very cordially, and not you only, but the country aUarge, upon the satisfactory progress which is now being made in Parliament by a bill intended to alter, and in my opinion to bring much nearer to a standard of reason and of justice, the law of libel in this country in its bearing upon the proceedingaof the Press. I say advisedly in its bearings upon the proceedings of the Press rather than upon the interests of the Press, because I am quite sure that whatever adverse bearing that law may have had upon the interests of the Press has been in reality, though perhaps striking those interests in the front rank and in the first place, has had in reality an adverse bearing upon the interest of the public at large. The interests of the public at large are essentially bound up with those of the Press. We live in times when the newspaper is a great social, political, and moral power — one so great that it cannot be overlooked by any of those who would comprehend the character of their country or the nature of those processes by which the action of a mighty nation is directed. . . . The Press, which was formerly the privilege of the educated class, has become the patrimony of the people. There is not a man possessed of the first elements of knowledge in their simplest form to whom the Press, at the price to which it has now descended, is not easily accessible; and if there be any among so many who have not arrived at those first elements of knowledge, that is their misfortune, and it is a reproach which, I trust, the Legislature of the country before many years are over will have taken effectual measures to efface.' . . . Speaking of tin criticisms of the newspaper Press, Mr Gladstone observed — 'If the criticisms and censures are unjust to an individual they will do him no harm, except it be through bis own want of manliness of character. If, on the other hand, they are just they are to him invaluable; they become the mirror in which he acquires the view and knowledge of what otherwise he could not j discern; from them he learns the means of amending his faults, of avoiding the errors he has committed, of making his abilities, whatever they may be, more available for the benefit of his fellow- . countrymen, of doing — I wont say more perfectly, but at any rate less imperfectly — the arduous work which Providence has appointed him to do.'