FROM FOREST—
WHEN you casually and carelessly open your newspaper of a morning, how often do you realise, even if you are aware, that it is the product of a score of busy organisations, with tentacles spread over the whole world, the operation of which involves the best brains and machinery of the age; that unlimited capital and thought are devoted to its daily production; that its continual appearance has created a new class of men who work at night and sleep by day; that its distribution requires the use of special trains, and the gathering of its news the opening at night of telegraph, cable, and telephone offices; that the public appetite for reading is sweeping away vast Scandinavian and American forests for the manufacture of the wood pulp of which the paper itself is made; and that the very journal you are reading may have formed part of a growing tree a month ago!
In the days of wagers, the wool growing on a sheep's back was once converted into a dresscoat by dinner-time—and they dined at four o'clock then! In the last few years a not dissimilar experiment resulted in the conversion of a tree that was growing at dawn into a newspaper by luncheon.
Your daily newspaper is the best bargain you will ever make, and you make it every day. Do you grasp the fact that your newspaper is the most splendid example of co-operation imaginable—that it enables you to obtain for a few pence each week that which, if only one copy were printed, would cost you, for telegraphy, for brain work, for machinery and building and land, a thousand pounds a day or more? The Duke of Westminster or Mr. Astor might buy a better horse, picture, or theatre seat than you can, but your newspaper is as good as theirs.
According to Mr. Labouchere and some other folk, the mystery of the press is the secret of its power. Yet I venture to think that if I lift the curtain a little—nay more, if I take the public behind the scenes for a short while—I shall be increasing rather than endangering the respect in which the newspaper press is very properly held in this country.
In the days when many newspapers were small sheets, produced in dark alleys, under the charge of disreputable ne'er-do-wells, who veiled a vast amount of vulgarity under the name of Bohemianism, it was doubtless a wise thing to surround the press with mystery. The less the public knew about a newspaper office the better for the newspaper. But to-day the public press is the concentration of all that is best in thought and all that is most modern in mechanism.
—TO FLEET STREET.
A three mile roll of paper.