Devils Lake weekly world. (Devils Lake, N.D.) 1911-1914, 1911-06-30
ADDRESS IS
DELIVERED BY
JAMES CRAY
SPLENDID TALK WAS GIVEN BY
MINNEAPOLIS JOURNAL Ed.
TORIAL WRITER.
THOSE WHO ATTENDED MEETING
PLEASED TO HEAR NOTABLE
NEWSPAPER MAN.
(Saturday's Daily.l

saturdays Dally.)
James Gray. Of Minneapolis, editorial
writer of the Minneapolis Journal, gave
a notable address yesterday afternoon.
Mr.. Gray said in part:
1t has been a great pleasure to re.
ceivc your invitation to address the
Press Association Of North Dakota. l
am not minded to say that, or to think
that my coming here can be Of as much
gratitude to You as to myself. You
who are critics of thought as we'll as
Of language, have, trust, come here
in the spirit of charity. Minnesota adj
mires the pluck and the Americanism
of North Dakota. We rejoice in your
prosperity and your great future. We
are glad to see your farms developing,
and your cities grow. 1t puts me in
mind of the Biblical story in referring
to Shadrach, Neschak and Abednego,
he children of Israel who went into the
fiery furnace and were warm friends,
thus may it be with Minnesota and
North Dakota; may we always be warm
friends. I want to say few words On
the press and its place in modern civil
ization. What is the essential differ
ence between the ancient and the mod
ern worlds, If we turn to literature
what do we fnd' Why, that the an
clients had everything in that line that
we have, except the congressional rec.
ord. They had Homer, who sang for
them, and sophocles, who put on plays;
they had dramas, both tragic and COM
ic; they had history and poetry and
philosophy; they had more literature,
though fewer books than we had; they
had so much immortal literature that
when Mr.. Elliott came to make his five
foot shelf of books, whose perusal he
believed would educate man, he includ-
ed about two feet Of literature procured
before the Christian era. In our 9th
century we have produced only two
poets, Dante and Milton, who could
compare with Homer, and only one
dramatist, Shakespeare, who could
stand beside Sophocles, nor do we over
shadow the ancients in art. Their sculp-
ture is the best the world ever saw,
and if we turn from art to war, we shall
find that the ancients created every
thing in that line exceupt gun powder,
the Chinese probably had that They
had their armies and their navies, they
marched great masses Of men hundreds
of miles across deserts, they built the
Chinese wall and the Romans erected
sky scrapers, they worked in cement,
! they dug subways, they engaged in
every line of engineering and architec-
! ture of which we know the secret, and
they produced works which are a Won
der and envy. The ancient was consid-
cradle of a man; he had all of our vir-
tues and our weaknesses. He got drunk
and lied about what kept him late at
! the office. He had our sense Of humor
/
two thousand years before we invented
it. He wondered as we do about the
stars, and about destiny, and the fu-
| ture, etc. We know that if we subtract
from each civilization all that is COM
mon to both, he will have nothing left,
and we shall have something left, and
shall have what he never attained, per-
sonal freedom, the safety Of property,
security of person, the sacredness of
the home, the habeas corpus these he
never achieved. We have them, and
we have them, believe, because we we
an institution which he never had, and
never conceived of: we have the free
press. With the guiding spirit Athens
might have ceased to be a province,
ana become an empire. With free speech
and the free press ancient Greece might
have united, without it Greek fought
against Greek, Athens scorned Sparta,
and Sparta at last, in jealous fatal ig.
norance, struck Athens down. The
proudest monument of ancient civiliza-
was overthrow for the lack of peo-
ple's press. Free speech and the free
press is one of mans Oldest demands.
1t has gone down with the blood Of
martyrs in all ages. 1t is only to say
that the newspaper had to come to give
it effect. It is not even to say that the
newspaper as a retailer Of news is Of
recent origin.
1t existed in Rome. The Roman no.