Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/269

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

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��him to send home his dispatches by telegraph. The result of this was to increase the sale of The Daily News by leaps and bounds, and the daily press now follows the same method. The Daily Telegraph numbers among its war correspondents Sir William Howard Russell, who represented the paper in the South African War of 1881, and Mr. Bennet Burleigh.

Taking advantage of wireless telegrams, The Daily Telegraph has supplemented from steamers crossing the Atlantic the official meteorological service ; and the special correspondent of the paper, on his way to the Peace Conference between Russia and Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905, made use of four eastward- bound steamers to transmit by Marconi's etheric waves an interview with M. Witte in mid- Atlantic.

On the 12th of October, 1908, The Daily Telegraph had the privilege to announce that " Her Majesty the Queen has prepared a Christmas Gift-Book which by her express desire is to bear her name, ' Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift-Book,' to be published by The Daily Telegraph, the proceeds of the sale to be applied ' for charity.' " The book, as is now well known, is one of photographs taken by the Queen herself. The demand for the work was so great that, within seventeen days, only 60,000 copies of the first edition of half a million remained for disposal. This edition was published on the 12th of November, and for its production seven different paper mills had been drawn upon, to the extent hi the aggregate of 250 tons of paper.

The works of public benevolence with which the paper has been associated include the relief of the sufferers in Lancashire by the cotton famine hi 1862 ; aid sent to Paris at the end of the Franco- German War ; the Jubilee Hospital Fund, 1897, for which 37,OOOZ. was raised ; while the Boer War Orphan Fund amounted to 253,OOOZ.

With such a record The Daily Telegraph rightly claims to " have shared in a general movement which has revolutionized the modern press, and carried its power and influence into many quarters which before the spread of compulsory education, had no knowledge of, or interest in, the events of the busy world." And although the newspaper " may have its faults and its failings, at least it cannot be denied that it is one of the most tremendous organs of public enlightenment which the developments of civilization have ever engendered."

��Its war corre- spondents.

��Wireless telegrams.

��Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift-Book.

��Its

philanthropic efforts.

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