TALMAGE ON THE NEWS PAPERS

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 157, 12 May 1879, Page 2

TALMAGE ON THE NEWS PAPERS

In tho course of one of his,sermons on " City Life in New York," the Rev. De Witt Talmage recently said : Hastening on up a few blocks, we came where, on the right aide, 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 looms to typesetters' and proof-readers' loft. These are the foundries whero tho great thunderbolts of the public opinion are forged, How the pens scratched ! How the types clicked ! How the scissors cut! How the wheels rushed, all the world's news rolling over the cylinder like Niagara at Table Bock. Great torrents of opinion of 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 off the end of telegraphic wire facts of religion and philosophy' and science, and information from the four winds of heaven ! In 1850 the Associated Press began to pay 200,000 dols, a year for news, and some of the individual sheets paying 50,000 dols. extra for despatches, Some of them, independent of tho Associated Press, with a' wire rake gathering up sheaves of news from all the great harvest-fields of the world. It is high time that men understood that the printing press is the mightiest engine of all tho centuries, The high-water mark of the printer's type-case shows the ebb or flow of the great oceanic tides of civilization and Christianity. Just think of it! In 1835 all tho daily newspapers of New York issued but 10,000 copies. Now there are 500,000, and taking the ordinary calculation that five people read a newspaper, two million five hundred thousand people read the daily newspapers of New York ! I once could not understand how the Bible statement could be true when it says that uations shall be born in a day. I can understand it now. .Get the telegraph operators and editors converted, and in 24 hours the whole earth will hear the salvation call. Nothing more impressed mein the night-exploration than the power of the press. But it is carried on with oh! what aching eyes, and what exhaustion of health, I did not find one man out of ten who had anything like brawny health in tho great newspaper establishments of New York The malodour of the ink, however complete the ventilation; the necessity of toilins; at hours when God had drawn the curtain of the night for natural sleep; the pressure of daily publication whatever breaks down; the temptation to intoxicating stimulants in order to the nervous energy up, a temptation which only the strongest can resist—all these make newspaper life something to be sympathised with. Do not begrudgo the three or the five cents you give for the newspaper. You buy not only intelligence with that, but you help to pay for sleepless nights, and smarting eyeballs, and racked brain and sepulchre."