Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/325

Rh The astounding thing is that this was supposed to be the sentiment of the state that gave to the world Jefferson, whose belief was that he would rather live in a land where there were newspapers and no government than in one where there was a government, but no newspapers.

What happened in the South was exactly what Jefferson considered the undesirable alternative, a government without newspapers,—that is, newspapers as the North knew them and in the proportion and relation to the people that the North had them. The number of white illiterates in the South was one of the results of a lack of democracy; it was also one of the causes. Journalism would have helped to cure this condition, paradox though that may seem. In recent times the success of a clever journalist,—Arthur Brisbane, editor of the New York Evening Journal,—has been due, in great measure, to the fact that he printed a certain section of his paper in type large enough to be read by many who could almost be classed as illiterates.

The people who eventually aroused the North were not the so-called aristocrats, not people of the type of Philip Hone, who suffered a nervous shock when he saw a Herald reporter enter Mrs. Brevoort's exclusive ballroom. It was the class of people who corresponded to the illiterates of the South who became a vital, moving power under the stimulation of free discussion; whose susceptibility to ideas and sensitiveness to moral conditions acted on northern journalism even when its beginnings were of the basest and most sordid description. These people, the "plain people," evolved their own leaders and champions,—Lincoln, Greeley, Samuel Bowles. of the Springfield Republican, William Lloyd Garrison,—whereas the same class at the South remained