Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/13



"Democracy," says John Morley, "has come to mean government by public opinion." Like democracy itself, public, opinion is a new power which has come into the world since the Middle Ages. "In fact," declared E. L. Godkin, "it is safe to say,_that before the French Revolution nothing of the kind was known or dreamt of in Europe. There was a certain truth in Louis XIV's statement, which now seems so droll, that he was himself the state. Public opinion was HIS opinion. In England, it may be said with equal safety, there was nothing that could be called public opinion, in the modern sense, before the passage of the Reform Bill."

Mr. Godkin, however, ignored the fact that, as early as 1738, Joseph Danvers rose in the House of Parliament and declared that Great Britain was then being governed by a power "that never was heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before it is the government of the press."

Before England knew of this power, this new authority, it was established in America. De Tocqueville thought he saw, in the first Puritan who landed on these shores, the embodiment of democracy, but it was in the acquittal of the printer John Peter Zenger in 1734 that the first evidence of government by public opinion triumphant was given. The law was against him and