Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/18

xiv body of the people; the achievement of that sovereignty was of the slowest development, and frequently the battle was made nowhere else than in the meagre and forgotten journals.

To journalism, then, democracy owes, not only its strength but, in whole or in part, all of its important victories. No political advance has been made in this country without the aid of the press; all of our democratic achievements have been accomplished with the help of men who were, in the beginning, regarded as mere mechanics, poor printers, or who were, in later periods, grudgingly given credit and political recognition as the representatives of a not entirely welcome social and political phenomenon.

Journalism, in turn, owes to democracy its enjoyment of enormous privileges, its practical admission into the government. In the preliminary skirmishes for liberty in this country, the people found that the free press was a powerful weapon by which they were able to wrest from tyranny the power of government. They found that through the press they could keep their own phalanxes compact, a difficult task in a country spread over the great area of the thirteen colonies.

"A free press" became their shibboleth. When a nation was born and the political thought of the philosophers of the eighteenth century had taken root, it was the press that made the battle for the extension of the suffrage and that wrested from the minority the power which, in a democracy, must be with the people. The abolition movement, variously explained, was a development of the democratic idea. What the statesmen of that time failed to realize was that there could not exist in a democracy a class, such as the slaveholders, claiming to have property rights in human beings. The press that