University Missourian. [volume] (Columbia, Mo.) 1908-1916, 1911-09-18

ing at Mayence. 1t is dif1cult to
think of Boston being SO slow along
any literary line. But then it was a
new line.
So the first American journal,
Public Occurrences" antedated the
Newsletter fourteen years. 1t was
reprint by R. Pierce, for Benjamin
Harris, in the old London Coffee
House, in Boston, of the New York
edition of the London Gazette. But
it lived just twenty-four hours, being
officially suppressed because of GER
tain undesirable mentiOnings.
A short quotation from it may not
be amisS.
Public Occurrences,
Both Foreign and Domestic.
Boston, Thursday, Sept. 25, 1890.
1t is designed that the country
shall be furnished once a month, or
(if any glut of occurrence) oftener,
with an account of such considera-
BILE things as have arrived unto our
notice.
Thirdly, that something may be
done towards the curing, or at least
the charming of that spirit of lying,
which prevails among us. Where
fore nothing shall be entered, but
what We have reason to believe is
true, repairing to the best foun-
tains for our information, and when
there appears any material mistake
in anything tina. is collected it shall
be corrected in the next"
But, unfortunately for such lofty
| journalistic ethics, there was NO
next" to continue the charming
of that spirit of lying"
Perhaps that ideal was too high
for anything, but the ephemeral in
that faraway day. But think of that
old Boston Newsletter or the Will
liamsburg Gazette, compared with
the Richmond Virginian of today.
Think of how many things are adver-
tised in the Richmond Virginian -
things in daily use-that perhaps
were not even imagined then in the
widest flights of fancy. How would
it seem to try to get along without
machinery run by steam, gasoline or
electricity? What could We do with
out the telephone, the telegraph, the
phonograph, 1.-The wireless" and the
thousands and one things that no
one had ever heard of then. Yet the
people of that day thought them
selves very progressive, and quite
pitied their great-grandfathers fo-
being such slow old fogies.
Did you ever see BENJAMIN Frank
Inns old printing press, and compare
it with Hoe Cylinder Press that can
print more large Sunday issues in
twenty minutes than Franklin's press
would run off business circulars N
one whole day? Yet Ben Franklin
had a lot of ego in his cosmos, and
was rather given to mental snobbery.
In 1929 he started the PENNSYLVANIA
Gazette-now the Saturday Evening
Post
Perhaps he also thought that some
of his predecessors as we'll as some
OF his contemporaries wrote like
for asses about asses" He felt their
ponderous editorials also were dis
NAL, abysmal and hopeless"-"the
ultimate reproach and final infamy"
of journalism.
But Benjamin Franklin was a
good fighter, and he, too, manifested
an invincibility to know when he was
editorially worsted in his struggles
with the pOnderous Science of Jour
nalese- in those days of crude jour-
nalistic beginnings. The frank ad-
mission in that one truthful James
edition Of Public Occurrences shows
that the gentle art of lying had
reached a considerable degree of de-
velopment more than two hundred
years ago. Then just think of what
lofty heights it has attained with
all our modern improvements for
perpetrating the lie direct, as we'll as
for adroitly avoiding the truth
But, after all, when We carefully
examine the insufficiency H ex-
uemes; when We strip standards and
rewards of their DISCUSSES; when We
measure the limits OF incongruity,
the mutations of contrasts and para
doxes, We need must realize that hu-
man nature then differed but little
from human nature now, that all
types Of conduct in all ages are but
different expressions Of our natural
growth, assisted to a great degree by
the very kind of education that the
newspaper gives. 1t is worth while
to believe that, for We are what We