[Speech of James Jeffrey Roche at the banquet of the Friendly Sons of
St. Patrick, New York City, March 17, 1894. John D. Crimmins presided.
Mr. Roche, as editor of the "Boston Pilot," responded for "The Press."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE FRIENDLY SONS OF ST.
PATRICK:--I am deeply sensible of the honor you have done me in
inviting me to respond to the toast which has just been read.
The virtues of the Press are so many and so self-evident that they
scarcely need a eulogist. Even the newspapers recognize and admit them.
If you had asked a New York journalist to sing the praises of his craft,
his native and professional modesty would have embarrassed his voice. If
you had asked a Chicagoan, the honorable chairman would have been
compelled to resort to cloture before the orator got through. If you had
asked a Philadelphian, he would have been in bed by this hour.
Therefore, you wisely went to the city which not only produces all the
virtues--but puts them up in cans, for export to all the world. We do
not claim to know everything, in Boston--but we do know where to find
it. We have an excellent newspaper press, daily and weekly, and should
either or both ever, by any chance, fail to know anything--past,
present, or to come--we have a Monday Lectureship, beside which the
Oracle of Delphi was a last year's almanac. [Applause.]
I met a man, on the train, yesterday--a New York man (he said he
was)--of very agreeable manners. He told me what his business was, and
when I told him my business in New York, he surprised me by asking:
"What are you going to say to them in your speech that will be real
sassy, and calculated to make all their pet corns ache?" I told him I
did not know what he meant, that of course I should say nothing but the
most pleasant things I could think of; that, in fact, I intended to read
my speech, lest, in the agitation of the moment, I might overlook some
complimentary impromptu little touch. Then he laughed and said: "Why,
that isn't the way to do at all--in New York. It is easy to see you are
a stranger, and don't read the papers. The correct thing nowadays is for
the guest to criticise his entertainers. Mayor So-and-So always does it.
And only last year--it was at an Irish banquet, too--the speaker of the
evening, a Down-Easter like yourself, just spilled boiling vitriol over
the whole company, and rubbed it in."
I told him I didn't believe that story, and asked him to tell me the
gentleman's name. And he only answered me, evasively: "I didn't say he
was a gentleman."
I trust I know better than to say anything uncomplimentary about the
Press of New York, which compiles, or constructs, news for the whole
Continent, not only before our slower communities have heard of the
things chronicled, but often, with commendable enterprise, before they
have happened.
I admire the Press of New York. There are a great many Boston men on it,
and I have no mission to reform it. In New York, when you have a surplus
of journalistic talent, you export it to London, where it is out of
place--some of it. The feverish race for priority, which kills off so
many American journalists, sometimes, it would seem, almost before their
time (but that is a matter of opinion), is unknown in London. A man who
reads the "London Times," regularly and conscientiously, is guaranteed
forever against insomnia. London "Punch" is a paper which the severest
ascetic may read, all through Lent, without danger to his sobriety of
soul.
London gets even with you, too. You send her an Astor, and she
retaliates with a Stead. We ought to deal gently with Mr. Stead; for he
says that we are all children of the one "Anglo-Saxon" family--without
regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. He avers that
England looks upon America as a brother, and that may be so. It is not
easy, at this distance of time, to know just how Romulus looked upon
Remus, how Esau looked upon Jacob, how Cain looked upon Abel--but I have
no doubt that it was in about the same light that England looks upon
America--fraternally! But she ought not to afflict us with Mr. Stead. We
have enough to bear without him.
We know that the Press has its faults and its weaknesses. We can see
them every day, in our miserable contemporaries, and we do not shirk the
painful duty of pointing them out. We know that it has also virtues,
manifold, and we do not deny them, when an appreciative audience
compliments us upon them. A conscientious journalist never shrinks from
the truth, even when it does violence to his modesty. In fact, he tells
the truth under all circumstances, or nearly all. If driven to the
painful alternative of choosing between that which is new and that which
is true, he wisely decides that "truth" is mighty, and will prevail,
whereas news won't keep. Nevertheless, it is a safe rule not to believe
everything that you see in the papers. Advertisers are human, and liable
to err.
Lamartine predicted, long ago, that before the end of the present
century the Press would be the whole literature of the world. His
prediction is almost verified already. The multiplication and the
magnitude of newspapers present, not a literary, but an economic
problem. The Sunday paper alone has grown, within a decade, from a
modest quarto to a volume of 48, 60, 96, 120 pages, with the stream
steadily rising and threatening the levees on both banks. At a similar
rate of expansion in the next ten years, it will be made up of not less
than 1,000 pages, and the man who undertakes to read it will be liable
to miss First Mass.
The thoughtful provision of giving away a "farm coupon" with every
number may avert trouble for a time, but it will be only for a time. The
reader will need a farm, on which to spread out and peruse his purchase;
but the world is small, and land has not the self-inflating quality of
paper.
But to speak more seriously: Is modern journalism, then, nothing but a
reflection of the frivolity of the day, of the passing love of
notoriety? I say no! I believe that the day of sensational journalism,
of the blanket sheet and the fearful woodcut, is already passing away.
Quantity cannot forever overcome quality, in that or any other field.
When we think of the men who have done honor to the newspaper
profession, we do not think so proudly of this or that one who "scooped"
his contemporaries with the first, or "exclusive," report of a murder or
a hanging, but of men like the late George W. Childs, whom all true
journalists honor and lament.
We think of the heroes of the pen, who carried their lives in their
hands as they went into strange, savage countries, pioneers of
civilization. It would be invidious to mention names, where the roll is
so long and glorious; but I think, at the moment, of O'Donovan, Forbes,
Stanley, Burnaby, Collins, and our own Irish-American, MacGahan, the
great-hearted correspondent, who changed the political map of Eastern
Europe by exposing the Bulgarian atrocities. The instinct which impelled
those men was the same which impelled Columbus.
I think, in another field, of the noblest man I have ever known, the
truest, most chivalrous gentleman, a newspaper man, an editor--I am
proud to say, an Irish-American editor--the memory of whose honored
name, I well know, is the only excuse for my being here to-night--John
Boyle O'Reilly! You have honored his name more than once here to-night,
and in honoring him you honor the profession which he so adorned.