The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-06-04

ing progress. that is like the gorgeous
 story of some enchanter's spell. Where
 in all the tales of those Arabian Nights
 Entertainments is anything so wonderful
 as wireless telegraphy, so weird and un-
 canny as talking over the seas without
 wires? What is Cinderella and her TO-
 marce compared with the Cinderella story
 today-the story that tells us how the
 world Is turning into her prince, shorten
 ing her hours of work, guaranteeing her
 a living wage, keeping her little brothers
 and sisters away from the factory and
 in school, and pensoning her widowed
 mother that she may care for her little
 flock! How tame is the old Cinderella
 story beside this! And Sindbad is losing his load, too-slowly, as the years form into decades, Sindbad Is .sloughing off the old man of the sea; the 12-hour day is almost gone, and the eight-hour day Is coming quickly; the diseases and acci-
 dents of labor are falling from his shoul- ders, being assumed by his employer; his bank savings are guaranteed by his gov ernment; his food is no longer poisoned; his tenement is ceasing to be a pit or infection; his shop is no longer a place of torture And every day the newspaper
 brings some fresh and inspiring chapter
 of these great stories to their readers.
 
 tales of sorcery and wizarding that come cleaning in celestial light across the pages of our newspapers every day. And in our country papers were rejoice Tn them because we know the heroes. We know Cinderella; she works in our button factory. We knew her father, who lived on Upper Mud creek and was soldier in the big war of the sixties. We know Sindbad; he is our neighbor and friend. He is not a mere number and wheel tender to us. We played with him as boys; we went to school with him in the lower grades before he had to leave, when his father died, to support the family. We see Cinderella and Sindbad every day, and when we read of their good fortunes we feel kindly toward the paper that tells us of these fine things. We open the country paper and say,N How blessed on the mountains are the feet of them that bring glad tidings,' and so we read it, every line. It is the daily chronicle of the doings of our friends. Of courdse our country papers are pro- vincial. We know that as well as any one. But then, so far as that goes, we know that all papers are provincial. How we laugh at the provncialisms of the New York and Boston and Chicago papers when we visit the cities! For the l high gods of civilization, being jealous of the press, have put upon all news papers this spell: that every one must ! be limited in interest to its own town and territory There can be no national ! daily newspaper, for before it reaches l the nation it's news is old and dull and as clammy as cold pancake. News does not keep. Twelve hours from the press l it is stale, fiat, and highly unproftable l However the trains may speed, however | the organization of the subscription de- partment and the press room may per- I feet itself the news spells before the ink
 dries, and there never may be in our | land 8 cosmopolitan press. So the cities papers find that they must fill up those l spaces, which in nationwide paper
 should be filled with the news from the far corners of our land. with city news. Thus in every country paper we have ] the local gossip of itsl title world. And
 our country papers are duplicated on a rather grander scale in the cities. What we do in six or eight or ten or twelve
 pages in the country. the city papers do in l 20 and 40.h pages. What they do what they do with certain prominent citizens
 in the social and criminal and financial world, we do also with our prominent 1 citizens in their little worlds.
 I And in the matter of mere circulation,
 our American country newspapers are | a feeble folk. yet they do as a matter of 1 fact build their homes upon the rock. l The circulation of daily newspapers in
 our cities-towns of over 400 O00-aggre- gates something over I, GOO, ,000. The other
 daily newspapers in the country circulate
 more than 100000, and the weeklies cir culate 2O,000,O00 more, and most of these
 weeklies are printed in our small country
 towns. We have. therefore a newspaper circulation of nearly 30. 900 outside of l our great cities. and only Il, 100000 in the great cities At least so says our latest I census bulletin And the money we coun- ] try editors have invested Is proportion ately larger than that our city brethren
 have invested.
 I But the beauty and the joy of our papers and their little worlds is that we
 who live in the country towns know our
 own heroes. Who knows Murphy in
 New York? Only few. Yet in Elm
 poria we all know Tom O'Connor-and love him. Who knows Morgan in New York? One man in 8 hundred thousand.
 Yet in Emporia who does not know
 George Newman, our banker and mer-
 chapt prince? Boston people pick up
 their morning papers and read with shud-
 dering horror of the crimes of their daily villain, yet read without that fine thrill
 that we we have when we hear that Al
 Ludorph is in jail again in Emporio. For we all know Al; we've ridden in his hack
 a score of times. And we take up our
 papey with the story of his frailties as