heavens, against the mountainous wall of observation. The newspaper has become, in every country where modern civilization exists, the oracle of the people. More than that, it has become the defender of the just rights of the people against the encroachments of the ambitious and the covetous few; so that it may of a truth be said that error and wrong can not long prevail where the Press is left free to combat them. The editors of the great newspapers are more absolutely the servants of the people than any of the servants placed in positions of trust and profit and power by their votes. They are more faithful to the people's interest, they are more inaccessible to the allurements of corruptionists, they have generally a clearer and more thorough understanding of the rights of the people, and voice their demands with greater accuracy and force, than any other class of men in the Republic, simply because they live nearer to the people and are, in many respects, the servants, in a more general sense, of the public opinion to which they give voice. The people are true to the editors only just as long as the editors are true to the people. An editor, with no readers of his paper, is in a much more pitiable plight than a lawyer without briefs, or a preacher without a charge.
Only those who understand thoroughly the serious nature of the contention of colored citizens for the cession to them of their full rights under the Constitution, and the magnitude and power of those who are now withholding those rights, and who also correctly estimate the commanding influence of the modern newspaper in creating, as well as giving, voice to public opinion, can have a correct idea of the great work reserved to the colored newspapers of the country. Even the colored people themselves do not understand it. Some of them even declare that colored newspapers are a nuisance; and so they are, in a measure, just as the colored people are a nuisance, in so far as they have a grievance which they
