people were crowned with such success that the demand for all the news uncolored and with all phases set forth had to be met. This change, the last and the greatest, came slowly and may not yet be said to have been completed. Yet to-day there is no newspaper that refuses to permit its readers to view both sides of a question; no newspaper that is entirely subservient to party politics; no newspaper that will support any party or man without protest.

In the development of the newspaper during the war schools of journalism were established that narrowed the development to certain channels for a time. The pioneers were imitated by others who followed closely the new lines set down. But the aim of all of them was, chiefly, to publish the news of the world, and publish it as soon as possible, and to-day these old schools have been merged into the system that has for its object that single thing-to gather the news of the world and all the news and publish it as quickly as possible.

The rapidity of the progress of newspaper development from the paper of sixty years ago to the metropolitan daily of the present is so apparent that a review of it is useless. A comparison of the old time Washington hand press and the new monster machine that prints the papers of to-day is indicative of the development. The former, with a tremendous outlay of time, labor, and patience on the part of the operators, printed slowly and imperfectly; the latter, requiring eighteen months to build, turns out two hundred and sixty papers a second, sixteen hundred every minute, receiving paper at one end from a roll containing two miles or more of white paper and turning out at the other end the printed, folded, pasted, and counted newspapers.

These great machines are composed of more than two thousand separate pieces, weigh thirty tons, and contain steel, iron, brass, wood, and cloth. The white paper is fed from two sides of the machine, and faster than the eye can follow is fed through the rapidly revolving rollers, over and under the cylinders bearing the plates from which the pages are printed, and emerges at two sides of the front of the press in the form of the finished newspaper. The mechanism as a

whole is so delicate that the slightest imperfection or break, the loosening of a roller or the breaking of a pin, is noted as quickly as it occurs.

Every evolution and development, almost without exception, of the past years in electricity is made use of in the production of the great daily and-times have indeed changed -no invention, no matter be it ever so costly, or apparently useless, is discarded without a fair trial if it embodies the possibility of making the production of the newspaper more complete.

The enterprise and originality of the American newspaper has made it second to none. At the present the newspaper struggles with one problem and only one, under which come all the lesser questions. That is, how to obtain all the news of all the world and present it to the readers promptly, accurately, and fully?

The increased cost of production has inevitably increased the importance of the commercial side of the newspaper. What was once almost wholly a profession is now largely a business. The telegraph tolls of large newspapers run from $5,000 to $10,000 a month, and the bill for white paper from $400,000 to $800,000 a year. The item of postage alone on a great newspaper to-day would equal the entire expense of a journal before the Mexican war.

The raw material-paper and ink-in penny papers frequently cost more than the wholesale price per copy, while the publisher expects to meet a loss on every copy of the Sunday paper sold.

The percentage of earnings in the volume of business done has diminished steadily for the last fifteen years. The public gets more for a smaller price while the publisher depends upon the increased volume of business to maintain his profit. Six of the newspapers in the country do a business approximating $3,000,000 a year, while several times that many do a business of $1,000,000 or more.

The cable is brought into use daily between the continents for the transmission of news in a condensed form. Leased wires stretch across the country from newspapers in one group to others receiving the service or from one newspaper

to another. The special correspondent is in the van in the march of progress. He is at the front in battles, with the men who fight and with the men who plan the war. He is with the exploring party pushing forward into new and unexplored lands and with him go the telegraph and the telephone to hurry to his paper-and to the public-the news of events as they occur.

Trained staffs report the events of great importance-as national conventions. Telegraph wires to the speakers' platform in the convention send the news of the gathering to the papers as fast as it develops. The speeches are flashed through by a code that has been evolved by the demand for speed and almost before the orator has finished his speech extras throughout the country are in the hands of readers whose comments are heard before the next speaker at the gathering has finished his peroration. The news of an election is known all over the country before the close of the day on which the ballots are cast. The assassination or coronation of a king or dignitary is known before the night or day that witnesses it has fallen upon this country.

The men who make this possible are engaged in what is to them the greatest of all professions. There are geniuses among them. They are usually men of great force. Only those who work win. The loiterer is lost. It is a profession that demands everything. Honor, honesty, ability, an infinite capacity for hard work-Carlyle's definition of geniusare the qualifications necessary for it. It endures no shams. For them it has nothing but failure; for the others, influence

-success.

PROGRESS IN THE PRINTING AND PUBLISHING

INDUSTRY.

BY WILLIAM S. ROSSITER.

[William S. Rossiter, statistician and publishing expert; born Westfield, Mass., September 9, 1861; graduated from Amherst college, 1884; entered journalism and was on the staff of the New York Tribune and New York Press; was in the printing and publishing business from 1890-9 and in 1900 was placed in charge of the publications of the twelfth census of the United States; appointed expert special agent of the census office for printing and publishing 1901, and chief clerk of the bureau, 1904; Author of several books of short stories and many contributions to magazines and of statistical papers.]

When judged by modern ideas of progress, the art of printing was nearly stationary for four hundred years. Printing has been the most generous contributor to human progress, the handmaiden of all the arts and industries, and, perhaps, the most powerful factor in making the nineteenth century the leader of all centuries in genius and invention; but it has been reserved for the last two decades to record the most substantial advances in the many and exacting details connected with the satisfactory production of a printed page. The invention of the 10 cylinder press, by Robert Hoe, in 1853, was declared by the lords of the privy council of England to be one of the greatest steps ever made in printing. But in the far more difficult field of machine composition, inventors made no appreciable progress during the greater portion of the nineteenth century; as late as 1880 the extended report of the tenth census of the United States upon this industry, after presenting evidence of the activity and progress of the period, declared:

"While all these improvements have been following each other in the printing and delivery of newspapers, the ingenuity of man has not yet invented a substitute for the setting of type by hand, the method of composition remaining precisely the same as it was when printing was first invented."

The first step toward the solution of this problem was taken in 1886, by Ottmar Merganthaler, who invented the linotype machine, which shortly afterwards came into gen