Part 6

With the sudden demand for more papers came rapid progress in the mechanical department of the business. Double cylinder presses capable of printing twenty thousand papers an hour were soon perfected, folding machines came into general use, stereotyping was employed to save time, labor, and wear of type, white paper was made from wood pulp at greatly reduced cost, and the progress in all departments of the business was by leaps and bounds until every demand was more than supplied and new expectations created. From that time forward invention kept pace with every increase of circulation. As soon as one press was found inadequate or imperfect, the manufacturers were ready to set up a faster and better one. As competition reduced the selling price of the newspaper, invention supplied every demand for the material of production at a reduced rate. The impetus to circulation imparted by the civil war created a new reading public, which rapidly grew to include every person who could read and a demand for all the news of the world once created would not be denied. The collection of news was quickly reduced to a system and perfected, until to-day no event of importance occurring in any part of the world is omitted from the daily record of current history.

The great cost of collecting news at the front and transmitting by telegraph full reports of battles during the civil war caused certain newspapers in New York city to enter into an arrangement to receive reports in duplicate and share expenses. Then the cost was further reduced by selling the news to papers in other cities. That was the beginning of the Associated Press, a plan of newspaper combination that ultimately made the buying and selling of news a great commercial enterprise. Within a few years after the close of the war this system had been developed until practically all the daily newspapers of the country were interested in it or subscribers to the news collected and sold. This feature of the business continued to grow until agencies for the collection and transmission of news were established throughout the world. Similar associations were formed in England and on the continent of Europe, and news exchanged with the American organization. In the United States the business was developed until newspapers of particular sections of the country and even those of single States formed associations on the principle of mutual benefit for the collection of full reports of all important events within the territory where they circulated. At the present time the system has been perfected until the great news agencies of the country receive reports of important events from every quarter of the globe with a degree of promptness and accuracy rendered possible only by thoroughness of organization and the constant exercise of the keenest intelligence. The collection of all the news of the world would not be possible under any other plan, but the American newspapers, having created a demand for the news, were the first to devise a system of obtaining it promptly at a cost that made possible the publication of daily papers at a profit in almost every town in the country. Brief reports of all important events are transmitted by cable or telegraph to a central office in New York, Washington, or Chicago, where they are condensed or elaborated, as occasion may require, and then sent out over special telegraph wires to papers all over the country that are subscribers to the service. The larger papers of the country, however, do not rely upon this service alone. They are represented by special correspondents not only in all the chief cities of the United States, but in London. Paris, Berlin, and other news centers of the Old World.

The development of the newspaper into a medium for recording day by day every event of human interest was so rapid during the civil war and the stirring times immediately thereafter that many faults of form and detail remained. The journalism of that period was a new departure, and the men who created it had no precedent to guide them, but all the time there was a steady and intelligent effort to improve in all directions. The efforts of the leading men in the profession, influenced by conditions and surroundings, resulted in the creation of what were for a time known as schools of journalism--that is, one man set up an ideal, and another man strived to create a journal of another character. The aim of all was to publish the general news of the day, but political influences were still strong enough to control editorial policy, and ultra-partisan and sectional views were incorporated in the record of events. There were still editors of great power and influence in politics and public affairs, and they tried to shape the current of the new condition by the force of editorial writing. A number of editors, of both the old and new order, for a time followed the policy of subordinating to partisan politics all other features of the newspaper. They sought to make the press the dominant influence in politics, and to do that they presented in their journals only one side of public and party questions. They undertook to think and to reason for their readers, and their partisan and sectional views were reflected in the news columns of their papers. So long as party feeling ran high this style of journalism was popular and successful, but the newspaper, being in the nature of an educator of the masses, soon set the people to thinking for themselves, and created a demand for the news of public and political events without the color of individual opinion. The change from intense partisanship to partial or complete independence of editorial utterance has come slowly, and is still under way. To-day there is no great daily newspaper in the United States so entirely subservient to a political party as to support any man or measure without question or protest. Politicians fear this spirit of independence, and therein lies the secret of the great power of the press in public affairs. The most powerful and successful journals are those that combine absolute fairness and honesty with independence.

So-called schools of journalism, in the rapid development of the profession during the past twenty years, have merged into one general system or plan, which is to get all the news and publish it. Journals may be graded or classified by their treatment of news and their judgment as to the intelligence and moral character of the reading public.

A detailed record of the development of the mechanical part of the newspaper business during the past thirty years would be almost a synopsis of all progress in science and art. The newspaper printing press of to-day, which prints, cuts, folds, and counts ninety-six thousand papers per hour, with one man to operate it, is the mechanical wonder of the age. It is justly regarded as the greatest piece of machinery that the ingenuity of man has yet devised. Type is no longer set by hand in the making of a newspaper, the letters being formed from the metal direct and cast in finished lines by machinery.

Studying the perfection and magnitude of the newspaper printing press of to-day it is difficult to realize that little more than half a century of time and invention stand between this piece of mechanism, that seems to work with human intelligence, and the Washington hand press, upon which the production of printed sheets was a matter of slow and arduous labor. The great metropolitan newspapers of to-day are printed by monster machines weighing thirty tons, composed of four thousand separate pieces of steel, iron, brass, wood, and cloth. In the great printing-press factory of R. Hoe & Co. eighteen months' time is required to build one of the modern presses, and the cost of it would have more than paid for all the newspaper printing presses in use in the United States at the beginning of the century. These monster machines are known as quadruple presses, which means that four complete presses have been built into one. When in operation, white paper is fed to them automatically from rolls, and this paper, with a speed greater than the eye can follow, is converted into the finished newspaper, printed on both sides, cut into sheets, pasted together, folded, counted, and deposited in files of fifty or one hundred at one side of the press. White paper is fed to the press from two points, and finished newspapers are delivered at two places on the opposite side. An idea of the speed with which the work is done may be gained by watching the printed papers fall from the folder. They drop so fast that the eye, no matter how well trained, can not count them. These presses have a capacity of ninety-six thousand four-, six-, or eight-page papers per hour, and forty-eight thousand ten-, twelve-, or sixteen-page papers. Their mechanism is so perfect and so carefully adjusted that the breaking of a narrow band of tape in the folder, the loosening of a nut, the slightest bending of a rod, friction in a bearing, or any other derangement, no matter how slight, is instantly apparent to the skilled machinist in charge.

The white paper used in making the newspapers of to-day is manufactured from wood pulp and is put up in long rolls, wound about an iron cylinder that can be adjusted in place at one end of the press. These rolls contain from two to four miles of paper, and weigh from eight hundred to twelve hundred pounds each. As soon as one roll is used up another is lifted into place, the loose ends of the two are pasted together, and, after a stop of less than two minutes, the great press is again belching forth finished newspapers at the rate of sixteen hundred a minute, or two hundred and sixty-six each second.

Almost every invention and device of recent years in connection with the use of electricity is in some way utilized in the production and distribution of the daily newspapers. The evolution of journalism having finally established the fact that the chief function of the daily newspaper is to publish the news of the world, the problem of the business is how to obtain the news surely, accurately, and promptly. The ocean cable has taken the place of the sailing vessel, the trained correspondent has succeeded the occasional contributor, the electric telegraph and telephone have entirely superseded the mail in the transmission of domestic news, and every event of human interest throughout the civilized world is placed before millions of readers within a few hours of its actual occurrence.

The collection of news is not restricted by any question of the cost of obtaining it. Fifty years ago it was considered a remarkable feat for one newspaper to obtain information of an important event in advance of competitors. To-day it is a matter of comment if any newspaper fails to publish all the news desired by its readers. If a war is fought on any part of the earth there are reporters on the firing line, and no expense is spared in collecting and transmitting by the quickest method available full reports of any event of world-wide importance. To-day the hiring of special trains, the stringing of a special line of telegraph wire, the charter of a ship, the fitting out of an exploring expedition, or any other great enterprise in the way of collecting information for the newspapers of the United States, is so much a part of the everyday business of journalism that such things are accepted as a matter of course, or cause no more than a passing comment.

Half a century ago the result of a national convention or election was not known all over the country for weeks afterward. In the case of a national convention to-day, telegraph wires lead from the convention hall into the offices of all the newspapers in the larger cities. An operator sits near the platform of the presiding officer, and with a muffled key he sends over the wire a full report of the proceedings, with a description of every incident of interest. At the other end of the line is an operator at a typecasting machine receiving the report and putting it into lines as fast as received. When a candidate for President has been nominated, extra editions of the daily papers are selling on the streets of cities a thousand miles away almost before the applause for the winning man has died out in the convention hall. The people of every city and town in the United States where a newspaper is published would feel themselves cheated of their rights if they failed to receive news of the result of an election by midnight of the day on which the ballots were cast.

In enterprise and originality the journalism of America leads the world at the end of the nineteenth century. As a profession, it commands, with alluring prospects of fame and fortune, the services of men of genius and learning. Those who enter it from choice succeed or fail quickly. It is a life of activity, a work where energy and intelligence are essential qualifications, and honor and honesty are certain of reward. There is no enduring place in the profession for hypocrisy, indolence, or mediocrity.

VALUE OF THE STUDY OF ART.

BY GEORGES PERROT.

Georges Perrot is one of the leading art writers and teachers of France. Born in 1832, not far from Paris, he was graduated from the École Normale about 1855, and was then for three years at the French School at Athens. From his return to the present day he has occupied, with honor and distinction, many positions in the world of letters. At present he is a member of the Institut, an officer of the Légion d'Honneur, a professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris, and the director of the École Normale Supérieure. He is best known to scholars outside of France by the magnificent work on the History of Art in Antiquity, which he is writing, assisted by Charles Chipiez, architecte du gouvernement, and of which seven superb quartos have already appeared. (Hachette et Cie.) In 1891, by a decree of the Minister of Public Instruction, the study of the history of the fine arts was introduced into a section of the studies pursued at the lycées. In an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1899, Perrot pleads for an increase of the time assigned to the study and for its introduction into other parts of the curriculum.

I have translated those pages of the article which are of general interest as a contribution to a subject which is deservedly attracting the attention of American institutions of learning.

D. CADY EATON.

Written and spoken language, the language of which the signs are words, is not the only language which man uses to convey his ideas. There is also the language of forms, which, with no less clearness and force, conveys the conceptions of the intellect and the sentiments of the heart. We study the history and the literature of bygone people for the purpose of acquiring a better knowledge of ourselves, and this knowledge is secured by becoming conscious of the different states of mind, to use a modern expression, through which our ancestors have passed. Even the most elementary and the most remote of these successive conditions are, unconsciously perhaps, represented in the depths of our being by beliefs and customs for which the present order and progress of civilization can not account.[16]

[Footnote 16: The highest education consists in the presentation and in the acceptance of the purest ideas and the highest ideals of all ages, whether they be presented in written or spoken words, in songs of voices or sounds of instruments, in plastic forms or glowing pictures, in humble lives or glorious actions. The well-educated man should be the product and the epitome of the best thoughts and sentiments the world has produced, for he carries the responsibility of past centuries.]

Not to go back to the Quaternary period or to the cave dwellers, there are many of these mental ideas or conditions which would remain hidden from the inquiry of the historian if he were limited to written testimony. One example may suffice: the discoveries of Schliemann, at Troy, Mycenæ, and Tiryns have rescued from oblivion a primitive Greece of which the Greeks themselves had preserved but a faint remembrance. Thus has been given to the Homeric epoch a background of many centuries. Now this Greece, contemporary of the Thutmoses and the Ramses of Egypt, anterior to not only Grecian history but even to Grecian tradition, could not write, but could work and use stone; could hew wood and fashion it for carpentry; could mold and bake clay; could melt and hammer lead, bronze, gold, and silver; and could carve ivory. Every bit of material fashioned by the instruments of this period has the value of an authentic document. How society was constituted, the life that was led, what notions were held of the hereafter--all these things are revealed by the marks the hands of man have left upon everything he touched. The colossal walls of Tiryns, the majestic funeral cupolas of Mycenæ, the divisions of the royal abodes of which the outlines can still be traced on the surface of the soil, and the arrangement of the sepulchres hidden beneath it all testify. So, too, the weapons, the instruments, the vases, and the jewels which have been found scattered about amid the ruins of the buildings or buried in the tombs. Thanks to all these monuments, we are beginning to recognize in a shadow which year by year glows with a brighter light the features which characterized the world of Achæan heroes of which the image, transformed by oral tradition and singularly enlarged by power of invention, is reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

From these obscure and remote ages let us transport ourselves to the Greece of Pisistratus, of Pericles, and of Alexander. Instructors of youth tell of the losses which have been made, and of how small a part of the literary work of Greek genius has escaped the great shipwreck of antiquity. Should they not also indicate where precious supplements of information may be found to fill the voids of written tradition? There are many variations of important myths, hardly mentioned in passing by obscure epitomizers of the lower centuries, which have furnished to ceramic artists subjects for pictures which make us acquainted with personages and with episodes of which writers have hardly left a trace. But even if we had the works of the cyclic poets, all of which have perished; if we had the lyric poets, of whom only Pindar has survived, and Bacchylides whose fragments are to-day the joy of Hellenists; if we had the whole of tragedy, of which we have but the remnants; if we had all of that comedy which is represented by Aristophanes alone; if we had all of the more ancient comedy, all of the middle period and all of the new, with Menander who since the Renaissance is the regret of all critics of fine apprehension--all this poetry could not exhaust the multiple fecundity and the prodigious richness of the imagination which created it. If malevolent Fortune had decreed the destruction of every bit of Greek plastic art we should have been condemned to perpetual ignorance of many aspects and methods of the Greek soul. Is there anything in literature worth the little clay figures of Tanagra in making clear how the Greeks apprehended and enjoyed female beauty: how they loved it not only in the noble and serious types of a Pallas or an Aphrodite, but even as presented by the humble inhabitants of little villages in the graceful _abandon_ of their everyday life and in the liberty of their most ordinary attitudes? If we base an opinion of the religion of the Greeks only upon the epithets used by poets in defining the gods and upon actions they attributed to them, we run the risk of judging wrongly. In contemplating their images we obtain clearer notions of the ideas associated with each divine type. Alas! we do not possess the great works of Phidias which according to men of authority made men more religious--the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia. But even in the reduced copies of these two masterpieces which have reached down to our time we can divine how the master expressed in the one the idea of calm and luminous intelligence and of supreme wisdom, and in the other the idea of that sovereign force in repose and of that omnipotence, tempered by goodness, which were conceived to exist in the sovereign of the universe, the father of gods and men.

In subsequent paragraphs Perrot imagines the Greek statues of the Louvre thus addressing a classical student:

"Young man, you who are studying Greece in Homer and Plato, in Sophocles and Herodotus, do not pass us by so quickly. We also belong to that Greece which you discern and which you seek in their writings, of which not without difficulty you decipher the prose and the verse. To understand and to love us, to read in our features the thoughts of which we are the expression, to seize in the modeling of our flesh and in the pure outline of our limbs the secret of the genius which created us, no grammar nor dictionary is needed; only apply yourself to the education of your eye. In this exercise, in this apprenticeship, you will find a pleasure which will become more and more keen as you become more capable of perceiving rapidly the finest gradations. If you aspire to become an authorized interpreter of Greek genius, do not fear that you may be losing time. When, by long and affectionate intercourse, you shall have sufficiently entered into our intimacy to be able at any given hour to evoke in your spirit, as clearly as if we stood before you, a vision of the forms which shall have become dear to you, then the images which shall be awakened in your memories when you read the poets will be akin to those which the same recitals and the same epithets suggested to the Greeks who saw us born. To them you will be drawn by similarity of impression. You will be nearer to them, nearer to thinking and feeling after their fashion, at least by moments, than the most subtle grammarian or the most learned Hellenist who never has seen us."

Turning from Greece to Italy, Perrot derives a no less striking lesson from the statues of Roman emperors: