One of the greatest achievements of our own time, yet too often overlooked, is the marvellously rapid diffusion of parliamentary news throughout the country. Important debates are frequently protracted in the House of Commons into the early hours of the morning. The speeches are instantly reported by the shorthand writers in the gallery, who dog the lips of the speakers and commit their every word to paper. Thus seized in the fleet lines of stenography, the words and phrases are then transcribed into long-hand. Relays of messengers carry the copy to the telegraph office, where the words are punched in the form of a mysterious language on slips of paper like tape, which are run through the Wheatstone telegraph transmitter, the electric current carrying the news to distant stations at the rate of several hundred words a minute. At these stations the receiving-machine pours out at an equal rate, another tape, bearing a record in a different character, from which relays of clerks, attending the oracle, convert the weighty sayings again into ordinary language. The news thus received is carried forthwith by a succession of messengers to the newspaper office; the compositors set the matter up in type; it is reviewed and edited by the men appointed to the duty; the columns are stereotyped, and in that form are placed in the printing-machines. The machines are set in motion at astonishing speed, turning out the newspapers cut and folded and ready for the reader. A staff is in attendance to place under cover the copies of subscribers for despatch by the early mails. These are carried to the post-office, and so transmitted to their destinations. Taking Edinburgh as a point for special consideration, all that has been stated applies to this city. For the first despatches to the north, the Scotsman and Leader newspapers are conveyed to certain trains as early as 4 A.M.; and by the breakfast-hour, or early in the forenoon, the parliamentary debates of the previous night are being discussed over the greater part of Scotland. And all this hurry and intellectual activity is going on while the nation at large is wrapped in sleep, and probably not one person in a hundred ever thinks or concerns himself to know how it is done.
The frequency and rapidity of communication between different parts of the world seems to have brought the whole globe into a very small focus, for obscure places, which would be unknown, one would think, beyond their own immediate neighbourhoods, are frequently well within the cognisance of persons living in far-distant quarters. An instance of this is given by the postmaster of Epworth, a village near to Doncaster. "We have," says the postmaster, "an odd place in this parish known as Nineveh Farm. Some years ago a letter was received here which had been posted somewhere in the United States of America, and was addressed merely
Mr. ——
Nineveh.
I have always regarded its delivery to the proper person as little less than a miracle, but it happened."
It is impossible to say how far the influence of this great revolution in the mail service on land and sea may extend. That the change has been, on the whole, to the advantage of mankind goes without saying. One contrast is here given, and the reader can draw his own conclusions in other directions. The peace of 1782, which followed the American War of Independence, was only arrived at after negotiations extending over more than two years. Prussia and Austria were at war in 1866. The campaign occupied seven days; and from the declaration of war to the formal conclusion of peace only seven weeks elapsed. Is it to be doubted that the difference in the two cases was, in large measure, due to the fact that news travelled slowly in the one case and fast in the other?
We may look back on the past with very mixed feelings,—dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, of lumbering and slumbering.
We are proud of our own era, as one full of life and activity, full of hurry and bustle, and as existing under the spell of high electrical tension. But too many of us know to our cost that this present whirl of daily life has one most serious drawback, summed up in the commonplace, but not the less true, saying,—
"It's the pace that kills."
Yet one more thought remains. Will the pace be kept up in the next hundred years? There is no reason to suppose it will not, and the world is hardly likely to go to sleep. Our successors who live a hundred years hence will doubtless learn much that man has not yet dreamt of. Time will produce many changes and reveal deep secrets; but as to what these shall be, let him prophesy who knows.