The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1838-05-29 00:00:00

THE NEWSPAPER PRESS.

To the sheet of paper which you see on your tables, served to
you so regularly, and studied by you with so touch ease, the
tour quarters of the globe contribute all the treasures of their
intelligence. Is one fact valuable to mankind discovered by
some scholar in the farthest ends of the earth ? Ten to one but
you will see it first announced in a paragraph of your newspaper.
Is there any abuse in your laws, it is the newspaper press that
drags it to day. Is there any invention that will augment your
comforts, or sharpen your industry?—it is in the newspaper that
it becomes familiar to you all. The newspaper is the chronicle
of civilization, the common reservoir into which every stream
pours its living waters, and at which every man may come to
drink. It is-in the newspaper that gives to liberty its practical
life. its constant observation, its perpetual vigilance, its unre-
laying activity. The newspaper is a daily and a sleepless watch-
man, that reports to you eves y danger which menaces the institu-
tions of your country, and its interests at home and abroad.
The newspaper informs legislation of public opinion, and it in-
forms the people of the acts of legislation ; thus keeping up that
constant sympathy, that good understaudiqg between people
and legislators, which conduces to the ma otenance of order,
and prevents the stern necessity of revolution. Dionysius the
tyrant had a chamber constructed in the form of a human ear,
so that he might learn every rumour, every whisper, that cir-
culated in the market place. What his chamber was to the
tyrant, the newspaper press is to the government of a free
people; it tells them our wishes—it apprises them of our wants
—it carries to the ear of power the blessings of the grateful'or
the murmurs or the oppressed. And this is not all. The news-
paper teems with the most practical morality; in its reports of
crime and punishment, you find a daily warning against tempta-
tion ; not a case in the police court, not a single trial of a wretched
outcast or a trembling felon, that does not preach us 3 the awful
lesson how imprudence leads to error, how error conducts to
guilt, how guilt reaps its bitter fruit of anguish and degradation.
Nor is even this all. The newspaper is the familiar bond that
binds together man and man—no matter what may be the dis-
tance of climate or the difference of race. Here it is that we
have learned how to sympathise with the slave, how to battle
for his rights—how to wrest the scourge from his taskmaster.
Over laud and over sea the voice of outraged humanity has
reached to the great heart of England, and raised up a host of
freeman as the liberators of the enslaved and tortured negro !
It is a law-book for the indolent, a sermon for the thoughtless, a
library for the pool : it may stimulate the most indifferent—in
may instruct the most profound. Such are the real advantages,
the substantial utility of the newspaper press. These, in spite
of all its abuses, have made it the boast of liberty, the glory of
civilization. For these it is that it has been justly likened to the
air we breathe; rot, like the air, it is the circulator of light; and,
like the air, it dispenses to us all, to the meanest awl to the
proudest, the common glory of the sun of truth.—E. L. Balwer's
Address at the opening of the Lincoln Tradesmen's Newsroom.

I DON'T LIKE' TO SEE—A dirty shirt covered with a clean
dickey ; a v,orking man who has two hats wearing the best
every day; windows patched with paper, rags, or turf; a hearse
standing at a landlord's door ; a sweep pressing through a
crowd; a woman's boot-lace dangling loose; orange-peels
thrown on the footpath; a man summoned before the magis-
trates for potatoe tithes to the amount of fivepence; an orphan
girl tempted to walk the streets for the purpose of prostitution ;
good meat thrown to the dogs; a workhouse funeral almost
without attendance ; a woman beating her child because it had
nearly been run over ! a country overseer putting out a poor
woman by the shoulders; two men fighting a pitched battle on
a Sunday- afternoon ; a man, after breaking a square of glass
in a window, running away to escape detection ; a child crying
for hours together in the cradle; a poor lad going to the factory
very much out of health ; a man stuffed with rich food until his
legs are obliged to be tied up ; a bed-room comb left full of hair;
a servant waiting at the table with dirty hands; a woman slip-
ping in at the back door of a public-house, with a little jug, at
tea time ; a justice fining persons for getting drunk, who fre-
quently gets fresh himself; a gold ring on the little finger ofa
dissenting minister ; a bishop riding in a carriage and four ;
Catholic priest with a smart young lady on his arm ; a beggar
exhibiting his wounds and deformations on the road side ; an
old man of 70 and a girl of 17 going to the church to be married;
a drunken coachman driving his horses at Lull gallop down the
street ; obscene and immoral prints in a bookseller's shop win-
dow; poor men pressing into the shop where the most violent
newspaper is to be sold ; clothes lying to be moth eaten, while
there are so many backs without covering; a coach-horse with
bleeding shoulders; a dog in a poor man's house, who gets re-
lief from the parish; children's shoes unbuttoned, and stockings
out at the heels; an umbrella oil a windy day with two broken
bones; a shop with dirty windows; the bailiffs carrying the bed
and chairs of a poor widow to the Obelisk, to.sell for rent; a
poor ragged wife seeking her husband al twelve on a Saturday
eight.—Educational Magazine.