This
product of the press, in quantity and quality, could not be distributed,
week after week, and year after year, among an ignorant class of people.
It could be accepted by intelligent, thinking, progressive minds only;
and, as a fact necessarily coexisting, we find the newspaper press
equally essential to the best-educated persons among us. The newspaper
press in America is a century and a half old; but its power does not
antedate this century, and its growth has been chiefly within the last
twenty-five years. What that growth has been may be easily seen by any
one who will compare the daily sheet of the last generation with the
daily sheet of this; and the future of the American press may be easily
predicted by those who consider the progressive influences among us, of
which the newspaper must always be the truest representative.
Within the same brief period of time it has become the fixed custom of
the people to associate together for educational objects.
As a consequence, we have the lyceum for all, libraries for all,
professional institutes and clubs for merchants, mechanics, and farmers,
and, at last, free libraries and lectures for the operatives in the
mills. Where these institutions can exist, there must be a high order of
general learning; and where these institutions do exist, and are
sustained, the learning of the people, whether high or low at any given
moment, must be rapidly improved.
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