VIII.

Publication day was always a time of great excitement. We were busy

all the morning getting the last editorials and the latest news in

type, and when the paper went to press in the afternoon the entire

force was drafted to the work of helping the engine and the press

through their various disabilities and reluctances. Several hands were

needed to run the press, even when it was in a willing frame; others

folded the papers as they came from it; as many more were called from

their wonted work to address them to the subscribers; for with the

well-known fickleness of their sex, the young ladies of the village

ceased to do this as soon as the novelty of the affair wore off.

Still, the office was always rather a lively scene, for the paper

was not delivered at the village houses, and each subscriber came

and got his copy; the villagers began to come about the hour we went

to press, the neighboring farmers called next day and throughout the

week. Nearly everybody who witnessed the throes of our machinery had

advice or sympathy to offer, and in a place where many people were of a

mechanical turn the spectacular failure of the editor’s additions and

improvements was naturally a source of public entertainment; perhaps

others got as much pleasure out of his inventions as he did.

Of course, about election time the excitement was intensified; we had

no railroad or telegraphic communication with the outer world, but it

was felt that we somehow had the news, and it was known that we had

the latest papers from Cleveland, and that our sheet would report the

intelligence from them. After all, however, there was nothing very

burning or seething in the eagerness of our subscribers. They could

wait; their knowledge of the event would not change it, or add or

take away one vote either way. I dare say it is not so very different

now, when the railroad and the telegraph have made the little place

simultaneous with New York and London. We people who fret our lives

out in cities do not know how tranquil life in the country still is.

We talk of the whirl and rush, as if it went on everywhere, but if you

will leave the express train anywhere and pass five miles into the

country, away from the great through lines, you will not find the whirl

and rush. People sometimes go mad there from the dulness and ennui, as

in the cities they sometimes go mad from the stress and the struggle;

and the problem of equalizing conditions has no phase more interesting

than that of getting the good of the city and the country out of the

one into the other. The old-fashioned country newspaper formed almost

the sole intellectual experience of the remote and quiet folks who

dwelt in their lonely farmsteads on the borders of the woods, with

few neighbors and infrequent visits to the township centre, where the

church, a store or two, and a tavern constituted a village. They got

it out of the post-office there once a week, and read it in the scanty

leisure left them by their farm-work or their household drudgery, and

I dare say they found it interesting. There were some men in every

neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, who, when they called on us,

seemed to have got it by heart, and who were ready to defend or combat

its positions with all comers; this sort usually took some other paper,

too, an agricultural paper, or the New York _Trybune_, as they called

it; or a weekly edition of a Cleveland journal. It was generally

believed that Horace Greeley wrote everything in the _Trybune_, and

when a country subscriber unfolded his _Trybune_, he said, with

comfortable expectation, “Well, let’s see what old Horace says _this_

week.” But by far the greater number of our subscribers took no paper

but our own. I do not know whether there is much more reading done now

on the farms, but I doubt it. In the villages, however, the circulation

of the nearest city dailies is pretty general, and there is a large

sale of the Sunday editions. I am not sure that this is an advantage,

but in the undeniable decay of interest in the local preaching, some

sort of mental relish for the only day of leisure is necessary. It is

not so much a pity that they read the Sunday papers, as that the Sunday

papers are so bad. If they were carefully and conscientiously made up,

they would be of great use; they wait their reformer, and they do not

seem impatient for him.

In the old time, we printers were rather more in touch with the world

outside on the journalistic lines than most of our fellow-villagers,

but otherwise we were as remote as any of them, and the weekly issue

of the paper had not often anything tumultuously exciting for us. The

greatest event of our year was the publication of the President’s

Message, which was a thrill in my childish life long before I had

any conception of its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, now

so universally used by the country papers, originated in the custom

which the printers within easy reach of a large city had of supplying

themselves with an edition of the President’s Message, to be folded

into their own sheet, when they did not print their outside on the

back of it. There was always a hot rivalry between the local papers

in getting out the Message, whether it was bought ready printed, or

whether it was set up in the office and printed in the body of the

paper. We had no local rival, but all the same we made haste when it

was a question of the Message. The printers filled their cases with

type, ready for the early copy of the Message, which the editor used

every device to secure; when it was once in hand they worked day and

night till it was all up, and then the paper was put to press at once,

without regard to the usual publication day; and the community was as

nearly electrified as could be with our journalistic enterprise, which

was more important in our eyes than the matters the Message treated of.

There is no longer the eager popular expectation of the President’s

Message that there once seemed to be; and I think it is something of

a loss, that ebb of the high tide of political feeling which began

with the era of our immense material prosperity. It was a feeling that

formed a solidarity of all the citizens, and if it was not always, or

often, the highest interest which can unite men, it was at least not

that deadly and selfish cult of business which centres each of us in

his own affairs and kills even our curiosity about others. Very likely

people were less bent on the pursuit of wealth in those days, because

there was less chance to grow rich, but the fact remains that they

_were_ less bent in that direction, and that they gave their minds to

other things more than they do now. I think those other things were

larger things, and that our civic type was once nobler than it is. It

was before the period of corruption, when it was not yet fully known

that dollars can do the work of votes, when the votes as yet rather

outnumbered the dollars, and more of us had the one than the other.

The great statesman, not the great millionaire, was then the American

ideal, and all about in the villages and on the farms the people were

eager to know what the President had said to Congress. They are not

eager to know now, and that seems rather a pity. Is it because in

the war which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy died, and by

operation of the same fatal anomaly the American Plutocracy, which

Lincoln foreboded, was born; and the people instinctively feel that

they have no longer the old interest in President or Congress?

There are those that say so, and, whether they are right or not, it

is certain that into the great centres where money is heaped up the

life of the country is drained, and the country press has suffered

with the other local interests. The railroads penetrate everywhere,

and carry the city papers seven times a week, where the home paper

pays its tardy visit once, with a patent inside imported from the

nearest money-centre, and its few columns of neighborhood gossip,

too inconsiderable to be gathered up by the correspondents of the

invasive dailies. Other causes have worked against the country press.

In counties where there were once two or three papers, there are now

eight or ten, without a material increase of population to draw upon

for support. The county printing, which the paper of the dominant

party could reckon upon, is now shared with other papers of the same

politics, and the amateur printing-offices belonging to ingenious boys

in every neighborhood get much of the small job-work which once came to

the publisher.

It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, for which no one

is more to blame than another, though human nature loves a scapegoat,

and from time to time we load up some individual with the common

sins, and drive him into a wilderness where he seems rather to enjoy

himself than otherwise. I suppose that even if the conditions had

continued favorable, the country press could never have become the

influence which our editor fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make

it. Like all of us who work at all, the country printer had to work

too hard; and he had little time to think or to tell how to make life

better and truer in any sort. His paper had once perhaps as much

influence as the country pulpit; its support was certainly of the

same scanty and reluctant sort, and it was without consecration by an

avowed self-devotion. He was concerned with the main chance first, and

after that there was often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I

should not instance him as an exemplary man, and I should be very far

from idealizing him; I should not like even to undertake the task of

idealizing a city journalist; and yet, in the retrospect at least, the

country printer has his pathos for me--the pathos of a man who began

to follow a thankless calling because he loved it, and kept on at it

because he loved it, or else because its service had warped and cramped

him out of form to follow any other.