Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/28

2 These two facts are important in the history of journalism.

The greatest of all liberties, it is said, is the liberty of opinion. Within a comparatively few years of the Mayflower's sailing, there had come, following the revival of learning and the development of the art of printing, an impetus toward freedom of expression such as the previous centuries had never known. How much the democratic idea—the democratic tendency that came with Christianity—owes to printing and how much the invention of printing owes to the growth of this idea is one of those nicely balanced questions that is not to be entered into here.

In "De Natura Deorum," Cicero put forth the idea of printing books, but there the idea rested for centuries. It was the fact that the world was stirring in the fifteenth century and that the revival of learning had brought about a demand for books, on the part of those who were not able to afford the great vellum manuscripts, that brought the printing press. It has been observed that the processes used in the printing press "are as old as the first medal which was ever struck."

We know that the Romans could have invented the printing press, and probably would have, were it not that slave labor satisfied their wants. There was among them the demand for publication; Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells of "thousands "of writers on the subject of Roman History alone, and Martial reports that copies of his "Epigrams" sold for six sestertii, less than the cost of a book to-day. But slave labor took the place of the printing press, and the ingrained belief that reading as well as thinking belonged to the ruling class rendered