Connecticut western news., 1896-03-26

every year enter the lists, and conse- Quently during the last few years a has died almost every day. The disease is epidemic. The larger pa- pers swallow the smaller ones, the whale taking down 50 minnows at one swallow. With more than 2, 900 dailies and weeklies in the United States and Canada, there are but S6 half century old. Newspapers do not average more than five venus existence. The most of them die of cholera infantum. 1t is high time that the people found out that the most successful way to sink money and keep 1t sunk is to start newspaper. There comes time when almost every one is smitten with the newspaper mania and starts one, or have stock in one he must or die.
 The conrse of procedure is about this: A literary man has an agricultural or scientific or political or religious idea which he wants to ventilate. He has no money of his own-literary men seldom have. But he talks of his ideas among friends until they become inflamed with the idea, and forthwith they buy type and press and rent com- posing room and gather corps of edi- tors, and with prospectus that proposes to cure everything the first copy is flung on the attention of an admiring world. After awhile one of the plain stockhold- CTS finds that no great revolution has been effected by this daily or weekly publication that neither sun nor moon stands still; that the world goes on ly- ing and cheating and stealing just as it did before the first issue. The aforesaid matter of fact stockholder wants to sell out his stock, but nobody wants to buy, and other stockholders get infected and sick of newspaperdom, and an enormous bill at the paper factory rolls into an avalanche, and the printers refuse to work until back wages are paid up, and the composition bows to the managing editor, and the managing editor bows to the editor in chief, and the editor in chief bows to the directors, and the di- rectors bow to the world at large, and all the subscribers wonder why their paper doesn't come. The world will have to learn that newspaper is as much of an institution as the Bank of
 
 enterprise. If you have the aforesaid agricultural or scientific or religious or political idea to ventilate, you had bet ter charge upon the world through the columns already established. It is folly for any one who cannot succeed at any thing else to try newspaperdom. If you cannot climb the hill back of your house. it is folly to try the sides of the Matter horn.
 Comes Through Fire.
 To publish a newspaper requires the skill, the precision, the boldness, the vigilance, the strategy of commander in chief. To edit newspaper requires that one be 8 statesman, an essayist, geographer, a statistician, and in &C., quisition encyclopedia. To man, to govern. to propel a newspaper until it shall be a fixed intitution, a national fact, demand more qualities than any business on earth. If you feel like start ing any newspaper, secular or religious, understand that you are being threat ened with softening of the brain or }u- macy, and, throwing your pocketbook in- to your wife's lap, start for some insane asylum before you do something des- perate. Meanwhile, as the dead news papers. week by week, are carried out to the burial, all the living newspapers give respectful obituary, telling when they were born and when they died. The best printers ink should give at least one stickful of epitaph. If 1t was . good paper. say. "Peace to its ashes. If it was bad paper. suggest the epir taph written for Francis Chartreuse: Here continueth to rot the body of Francis Chartreuse, who, with an in- flexible constancy and uniformity of life. persisted in the practice of every human vice, excepting prodigality and hypocrisy. His unsuitable avarice e1. empted him from the first, his match less impotence from Il @ second. !" say this because want you to know that good. healthy, long lived. entertaining newspaper is not an easy blessing, but one that comes to us through the fire.
 First of all, newspapers make knowl- edge democratic and for the multitude. The public library is a haymow so high up that few can reach it, while the newspaper throws down the forage to our feet. Public ibrariea are the reser- voirs where the. great floods are stored high up and away of. The newspaper is the tunnel that brings them down to the pitchers of all the people. The chief use of great libraries is to make news papers out of. Great libraries make a few men and women very wise. News papers lift whole nations into the sun light. Better have 50, 900, 900 people moderately intelligent than 100, 900 solons.
 A false depression is abroad that newspaper knowledge is ephemeral be- cause periodicals are thrown aside. and not one out of ten thousand people files them for future reference. Such knowl- edge, so far from being ephemeral, goes into the very structure of the worlds heart and brain and decides the destiny of churches and nations. Know ledge on the shelf is of little worth. It is knowl- edge afoot, knowledge harnessed, knowl- edge in revolution, knowledge winged, knowledge projected, knowledge thun- derbolted. So far from being ephem- eral, nearly all the best minds and hearts nave thelr hands on the printing press today and have had since it got emanci- pated. Adams and Hancock and Otis used to go to the Boston Gazette and compose articles on the rights of the people. Benjamin Franklin, De Witt Clinton, Hamilton, Jefferson, Quincy, were strong in newspaperdom. Many of the immortal things that have been pub
 lished in book form first appeared in what yon may call the ephemeral period ical All Macaulay s essays first appeared
 in review. All Carlyle's, all Ruskin s.
 all McIntosh's, all Sydney Smiths, all
 Hazlitt's, all Thackerary, g, all the ele-
 vated works of fiction in our day. are
 reprints from periodicals in which
 they appeared as serials Tennyson 8
 poems, Burns poems, Longfellow' s
 poems, Emerson's poems, Lowell's
 poems, Whittier's poems, were once