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CHAPTER VIII

THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT “ Much have I seen and known; cities ofmen

And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honor'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro ' Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end , To rust unburnish 'd, not to shine in use! "

Tennyson, Ulysses.

SPECIAL correspondence is the chameleon of the press. Its ancestors have been numerous, and its own forms are protean. In the early seventeenth century it grew out of the letters con cerning the Thirty Years' War.

In the eighteenth century in

England, it was in form the political pamphlet or tract. At the close of the century, its highest type is represented by the Letters of Junius and its importance at that time is best described by

John Wade when he says, “ Newspaper correspondence had an authority and interest in the time of Junius which it no longer

possesses, and the Miscellaneous Letters derive a value from the illustration they afford of this antecedent phase of journalism. At this period existed none of those leading articles or elaborate commentaries on public questions, which now occupy so promi

nent a place in our daily papers. The correspondents of the press

were then the only writers of political communications which bore the character of leaders; and, as reports of the debates were not permitted, members of either house suffered equally with the

people in possessing no common channel by which the one could learn, and the other convey, their sentiments. In consequence of this restrictive system, the correspondence of newspapers formed

the most talented portion of their contents, influential men of all