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CHAPTER IV

THE PRESS AND OTHER ACTIVITIES

' The newspaper is parent, school, college, pulpit, theatre, example, councelor, all in one." — Wendell Phillips. “ The modern newspaper literally has its fingers reaching out toward every quarter of the globe, and every finger is sensitive, and every nerve brings back the treasures of the intellectual wealth that are stored up there, and a photograph of the occurrences of life that are there taking place.” — C . D . Warner. The functions of a newspaper " are practically those of a middleman

between the public and matters of public interest.” - H. W. Steed.

THE press is a living exemplification of the truth of the Biblical phrase " none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him

self.” Probably more than any other single agency it touches every other activity in human society, and in this lies its great value in a reconstruction of the past. As long as history was

interpreted as meaning a chronicle of the deeds of individual heroes, or of the events that concerned kings and courts, or of the acts of armies, or a description of the ceremonies of the Church, the historian could confine himself to the comparatively few classes of sources immediately connected with his subject, — the

material demanded for a history of one dimension was simple and easily obtainable. But a history of four dimensions demands an

infinite variety of sources, and the connection of the press with a vast range of human interests places it in the forefront among

the sources that claim the attention of the historian. A bare enumeration of some of these interests must show that the news

paper can not be neglected by him, while an examination of the connection thus made is essential in determining how far the relation of the press to other activities is a guarantee of its

authoritativeness, and to what extent its authoritativeness is thereby limited. The newspaper and the government are connected primarily

through the general questions of freedom of the press and censor

ship of the press. But many specific questions bring the two into