CHAPTER III.
LONDON AND COUNTY NEWSPAPERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
This folio of four pages, happy work!
Which not e'en critics criticise . . .
What is it but a map of busy life,
Its fluctuations and its vast concerns?
Cowper.
BETWEEN the newspapers of the eighteenth century and those of the present day, there is as great a dissimilarity as between the stagecoach of past times and the express railway train of to-day. News is now printed and circulated with a speed which a century ago would have been deemed miraculous. Even from remote quarters of the world the electric wire brings intelligence of noteworthy events, and the news is published almost simultaneously with their occurrence. Hardly has the applause with which the peroration of some great orator is greeted ceased to echo through the hall, ere the printed sheet makes its appearance, it may be hundreds of miles distant, with a full report of the speech fresh from the lips of the speaker. These, of course, are feats which mechanical and scientific progress have made possible, and the English newspaper press, more than any other intellectual enterprise—owing to the perfect freedom it enjoys from Governmental control—is able and ready to avail itself of everything which can facilitate the rapid collection and distribution of news.
Modern inventions and progress have undoubtedly tended greatly to intellectual alertness. Such alertness may not be without its disadvantages, not so much perhaps as regards the presentation of news, as of opinion.
