I
_The Birth of Stentor_
It is some eight thousand years ago that Man, having already set
himself apart from the brute creation by walking on two legs and
creating the art of speech, paved the way to the “best seller” by the
invention of writing.
The nomad settled in the village. From the village there grew the city.
Empires rose, fell, and crumbled into decay. Plato, Homer, Aristotle,
Dante, da Vinci, Shakespeare enlarged the boundaries of intellect and
of emotion. America was rediscovered. Moveable types were introduced
to Europe. And the newspaper, via the printed book and the pamphlet,
sprang from the loins of Gutenberg. Grub Street gave place to Fleet
Street, and the Carmelites to Carmelite House. Compulsory schooling
for the masses produced a new social phenomenon in the shape of whole
nations among whom the illiterate was the exception, and Demos roared
voraciously for newsprint. And the halfpenny “daily” created a demand
for the forest products of Newfoundland.
So may our grandchildren condense their Outline of History.
Historically considered, the Newspaper is an upstart, although its
germs existed in the Roman Empire in the shape of _Acta Diurna_ and
_Acta Publica_, Government publications which contained registers of
births and deaths, and particulars of the corn supply and of payments
into the Treasury. The _Acta_ even embodied so modern a feature as the
Court Circular.
Journalism found no incitement during the Dark and Middle Ages, and
the use of moveable types at first stimulated the production of books
rather than that of periodicals. By the latter half of the fifteenth
century, rudimentary journals were, however, making their more or
less regular appearance in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and embedded
in Continental archives is to be found at least one copy of a
contemporary account of Columbus’ voyages to America recorded while his
journeyings still represented the latest news.
The sixteenth century saw the _Gazzetta_, an Italian production in
manuscript, to be read on payment of a _gazzetta_, a small coin of the
period, which eventually gave its name as a synonym for newspapers
and other publications. None of these Continental attempts to assuage
the thirst for news seems, however, to have embodied the seeds of
permanence, and the idea of a Newspaper in the modern sense, that is,
of a publication issued at regular intervals and characterised by
continuity in administration and policy, is largely English. The first
regular English newspaper was the _Weekly News from Italy, Germany,
etc._, founded in 1622, and nineteen years later an English paper
secured a “scoop” by publishing a report of a Parliamentary debate for
the first time on record. In 1709, London had its first daily under
the title of the _Daily Courant_; the _Morning Post_ dates back to
1772; and the _Times_, originally established as the _Daily Universal
Register_, followed in 1785.
It is almost impossible to assign a definite historical date for the
inception of the newspaper as a regular institution created to satisfy
a public demand, since so many of the journalistic pioneers were both
of a fugitive and ephemeral nature, whilst others were pamphlets
rather than news bulletins. But if we strike a mean between the _Daily
Courant_ and the _Morning Post_, we may say that the newspaper has
enjoyed some two centuries of vigorous life. It has thus witnessed the
birth of the Industrial Age and of its offspring, Mechanical Transport,
has seen the formation of the United States of America, the peopling
of Canada and Australia, the fall of most European thrones, the
development of great communities in South America, the birth of flying,
and the shifting of the centre of gravity of political power from the
semi-instructed few to the uninstructed many. If Stentor has lost his
head a trifle at the contemplation of such an unparalleled record of
human activity, and of a period pregnant with such almost unimaginable
possibilities for good and evil, who shall wonder?