It was and is: mark it! that not a single office is conferred for good reasons, that men are kept out of office or removed therefrom for arbitrary and corrupt reasons. And this is as applicable to townships, counties, cities, states, as it is to the Federal government! All purchases of material for public use, all employments for the public service, and all contracts are awarded from party motives! Not even a court can now be established or a judge elected, unless tribute is paid to the dominant party. Not a vote is cast, no public policy formed or pursued, no public step taken, not a newspaper article written, not a speech made, no public career, not even the smallest ambitious aspiration possible, unless one or the other party backs it and supports. it. The world has no conception of the tyranny and cruelty this state of things inflicts on the intelligence and virtue of the land!

There is but one political status in history, which at all equals the condition of things that now curses the United States. It was that of the latter part of the Middle Ages, when the condottieri were masters of society. But these soldiers of fortune had, at least, military capacity; their personal bearing was brave, if venal. Our partisans are, many of them, ruffianstrue indeed, while it pays, to a cause; but they sneak in and sneak out in ways that are disgusting to themselves and to those that employ them. They are the only well-defined class in this country; they infect all party movements, rule over our legislatures as lobbyists, control presidents, are familiar with judges, cabinet ministers, governors; and can and do proscribe the political talent, culture, and integrity of the land. They defeat every reform, ravish ballot-boxes, count in and out, whom they please. Publicly divided into two parties, they fraternize in secret. The voters are their puppets, the abuse of taxation and of public credit their means of support. In such a system, for system it is, there is no room for the only object that justifies a party, that of being an educatory medium for teaching some truth or eradicating some evil. Those who still

1 With all our aversions to permanent party divisions, we must still, lest we should be misunderstood, quote the following expressions of Burke :

"Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of an evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and oppose it with united strength. Whereas when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. When men have no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest subsisting among them, it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself, that his single unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to defeat the subtle

have idealities in this direction, are like Diogenes of old, walking about in midday with lanterns in their hands, hunting honest men; but we see no light in their lanterns.

When we had to read of "spiritual manifestations," and of summonings of the dead" before them, it was always a consolation to us, that we could not believe them to be true; for what greater anguish could be inflicted on spirits like those of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jackson, Clay, Silas Wright, Webster, Benton, Van Buren, Calhoun, and Lincoln, than to make them visit our nominating conventions, our executive committee rooms, and the conclaves of our politicians? How bitter would be the reflection to them, that much, if not all of our political ills, are due to their neglect, to establish stable public authorities, or even popular parties and organizations, that could carry on, by the aid of the whole country, and under responsibility to it, a general, well-defined public policy. Hamilton once exclaimed: "A people without a government is a terrible sight to me!" Why did he not go one step further, and say: "A popular party domineering over government, and spoliating society, is the most hideous of all tyrannies"? Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson, especially not the latter, could announce this truth, because they had the mental habit of dividing the people into two herds, one of whom they presumed to be for, and the other against their beau-ideal of government. They of course wanted the good shepherds of their flocks to govern. Jefferson often asked derisively: “Have we angels in the form of kings to govern society?" But he never searched his own mind to be certain, whether his presupposition of a natural division of mankind into two parties, the one loving liberty, the other seeking to oppress, did not amount to asserting this angelic prerogative of government for his party of freedom? No such charge can be brought against Washington's idea;—that of teaching by example, of doing one's full duty to the present, and of depositing wisdom in solemn state papers, as a possession for the whole people, and for the guidance of the entire nation. We ask the observant reader to ponder well on this distinction, and perhaps he will be ready to reverse the motto that stands at the head of this chapter, and to say with a modern thinker

"All things are serious facts, events are just,
They come to men, precisely as they must.'

designs or cabals of ambitious citizens.

When bad men combine, the good must

associate, else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice, in a contemptible struggle.'

CHAPTER XI.

THE PRESS IN AMERICA.

"The Press is the assay office of Literature."-Westminster Review.'

WHEN Jefferson declared, that "if he had to choose between a government without a free press or a free press without a government," he would prefer the latter, he begged the question twice, and missed the true point entirely. Both, a government without a free press and a free press without a government, have been impossibilities in America; they were never even probabilities. And J. Q. B. De Bow gave a much better definition in the census of 1850, when he said: "In every country the press must be regarded a great educational agency.' But, when he added, The press constitutes the aegis of American liberty," he used a misleading figure of speech; for the press is a danger as well as a shield; and both for and against liberty, according to the hands it is in, or the mode and manner of its employment. Like all educational agencies, the press is beneficial only to the degree to which it is rightfully developed and organized. The very conception, of either the parties, the schools, the churches, or the presses of a country, being its government, proves a lack of understanding of their true relations to society; for while either may be organs for special functions of government, neither should be its administrative, executive, legislative and judicial authorities. Mankind has made bitter experiences on this point with its churches, and it would be a pity if young America were to repeat them as to its press.

Mr. Jefferson shot also wide of the mark, when he speaks only of a free press and not also of a free government. Why chains for the latter, and liberty for the former alone? Is not the freedom due to one due to both? Is not the unfreedom of either the unfreedom of society? We think America has to answer both questions in the affirmative; or it will continue to have a press, that subjects society and its government to its pleasure and profit, and rides

rough-shod over what is called (sic!) "the free-est people on the globe."

One obstacle, to a correct understanding of the proper functions and relations of the press, has always been, that the popular mind would comprehend in the word only the newspapers and political journals, and that it left out the books, treatises, pamphlets, and public documents. The remark quoted at the head of the chapter rests on a correcter definition, it includes all publications, and their action, inter and re-action on each other; for only a mutually interacting, and therefore mutually improving entire press, is not a public danger! Without this mutuality there is no reciprocal education, but there is sure to be a constant strife for mastery, and ultimately one part becomes the tyrant, the other the plaything. We say then: the press must be free within itself, yet subject to law; if it is to be the organ of freedom for society. And the better this is so, the less need is there for any restraint and correction by public authority, and vice versa. The true criterion, then, by which a nation's press must be judged, is not the degree of liberty it has, but the degree thereof, which it deserves. The state may be too weak in moral force to impose all the restraint it should, and the press may be too weak to resist an undue amount of repression. And thus we see that there may be in this matter false exercises of power as well as abuses of liberty. The happy condition is only there, where they mutually strengthen and perfect each other, and where each is too well tempered, either to submit to tyranny or to impose it. The press creates indeed its own law, but it owes society also loyalty; it must not want to govern, where it should either educate or be educated. The interests of society and its press should ever be regarded as identical, and neither should want to gain wealth and power at the expense of the other, by taking undue advantage of accidental relations. These premises are the standard, by which we propose to discuss the subject before us.

It was a trite designation to call America "the newspaper nation;" but the Irishman who heard it and wanted to know whether the country belonged to the newspapers, or the newspapers to the country, was also in point; and so was the French young diplomat, who, noticing the large number of newspapers, about the hotel of an American ambassador, wanted to know of the secretary whether they were not the real attachés of the embassy? Well! we don't know that it hurts us any, to be thought a unit with our papers.

We must have had this theory in our mind when we entered

upon our investigations in reference to this chapter; for we were disappointed to find, that the pilgrim fathers brought neither a newspaper establishment with them, nor did they institute one soon after landing. "The earliest newspaper in North America was the Boston News-Letter, issued April 24, 1704;" so says the Compendium of the United States Census, 1850, p. 154. Think of it, kind reader! A hundred years of prosperous and free white settlement in America without a newspaper! The same authority states, that "in 1720 there were but seven newspapers in the American colonies, and in 1775 but thirty-five; and of these seven were in Massachusetts, one each in New Hampshire and Georgia, two each in Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, three in South Carolina, four each in Connecticut and New York, and nine in Pennsylvania. The total was, in 1870, 5871; of which New York had 835; Pennsylvania, 279; Massachusetts, 259; Iowa, 233; Michigan, 211; California, 201; the rest of the states being below 200, Arizona territory having but one. The preponderance of Pennsylvania in 1775 was no doubt due to the presence of Franklin-the press educator par excellence in America. This is another instance of the lesson culled from history by political science; to wit: "that the centre of public intelligence and power always follows the best educators of a people." It is now in New York, because there the press is most influenced by the highest educating cause'commerce"; for it has the world at large for its lesson-book; and this carries with it encouragement of enlightening authorship.

In 1810 the total number of papers was 359; in 1828, 852; in 1840, 1631. And of the latter number 138 were daily, 1141 weekly, 125 semi-weekly, 227 monthly, &c. New York had then already secured preponderance, but the editorial talent was still largely in the weeklies. They made the politics of the United States, and they were chiefly the recruiting offices for the editorial capacities in the dailies and periodicals. University education, or general culture, were not yet deemed essential for an editorship; indeed, we may say, it would have been rather in the way of editorial success.

By 1850 the census gives us, beside the number of papers and their subdivisions, also the number of annual issues; the total of the latter being 426,500,000, of which the dailies had 235,000,000, the weekly, 153,000,000, the semi and tri weekly, 17,000,000, and the monthlies, semi-monthlies, and quarterlies about 20,000,000; the more solid reading now being about one-fifth of the whole, if counted by the number of issues. But this proportion changes, if we compute the number of houses or families in which the respective papers were taken. The dailies