Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/492

, I should

answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only .' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melan choly truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's

abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes

suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who

are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed

be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, & c., & c .; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them ; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still

learn the great facts, and the details are all false.” 1 He realizes that Jefferson was probably still rasping under the Sedition Act passed by the Federalists and the prosecutions that

had been directed under it against the journalists and hack writers of his own party and that his own confidence in some of

these men, like Callender, had been misplaced, yet Jefferson's words carry weight. The Duke of Wellington had held in no higher favor the English press of the same period. In the hundred and more years that have passed since these judgments were

given, men in public life have expressed opinions no more favor able to the veracity of the press. It was not aloneMatthew Arnold who nearly forty years ago found the American papers below par,3— similar criticisms were 1 Writings of Jefferson, ed. by P. L. Ford, IX , 73–74. 2 J. H. Stocqueler, supra, p. 198, note. 3 “ They (the Americans) are excellent people, but their press seems to

me at present an awful symptom .” — Matthew Arnold, Letters, I, 271. “ The great relief will be to cease seeing the American newspapers. Here

onemust read them, for through them only can one get the European news;