VERY few of the great mass of humanity know who makes the beautiful
public document, with its plain, black binding and wealth of statistics.
Few stop to think that hidden away from the great work-a-day world,
with eyelids heavy and red, and with finger-nails black with antimony,
toiling on at his case hour after hour, the public printer, during
the sessions of Congress, is setting up the thrilling chapters of the
Congressional Record, and between times yanking the Washington press
backward and forward, with his suspenders hanging down, as he prints
this beautiful sea-side library of song.
We are too prone to read that which gives us pleasure without thought
of the labor necessary to its creation. We glide gaily through the
Congressional Record, pleased with its more attractive features, viz:
its ayes and noes--little recking that Sterling P. Rounds, the public
printer, stands in the subdued gaslight with his stick half full, trying
to decipher the manuscript of some reticent representative, whose speech
was yesterday delivered to the janitor as he polished the porcelain
cuspidor of Congress.
This is a day and age of the world when men take that which comes to
them, and do not stop to investigate the pain and toil it costs. They
never inquire into the mystery of manufacture, or try to learn the
details of its construction. Most of our libraries are replete with
books which we have received at the hands of a generous government,
and yet we treat those volumes with scorn and contumely. We jeer at the
footsore bugologist who has chased the large, green worm from tree to
tree, in order that we may be wise. We speak sneeringly of the man who
stuffs the woodtick, and paints the gaudy wings of the squash-bug that
we may know how often she orates.
Year after year the entomologist treads the same weary road with his
bait-box tied to his waist, wooing to his laboratory the army-worm and
the sheep-scab larvæ in order that we, poor particles on the surface of
the great earth, may know how these minute creatures rise, flourish and
decay.
Then the public printer throws in his case, rubs his finger and thumb
over a lump of alum, takes a chew of tobacco, and puts in type these
words of wisdom from the lips of gray-bearded savants, that knowledge
may be scattered over the broad republic. Patiently he goes on with
the click of type, anon in an absorbed way, while we, gay, thoughtless
mortals, wear out the long summer day at a basket picnic, with deft
fingers selecting the large red ant from our cold ham.
Thus these books are made which come to us wrapped in manilla and
franked by the man we voted for last fall. Beautiful lithographs,
illustrating the different stages of hog cholera, deck their pages. Rich
oil paintings of gaudy tobacco worms chase each other from preface to
errata. Magnificent chromos of the foot and mouth disease appeal to us
from page after page, and statistics boil out between them, showing what
per cent of invalid or convalescent animals was sent abroad, and what
per cent was worked into oleomargarine and pressed corn beef.
And what becomes of all this wealth of information--this mammoth
aggregation of costly knowledge?
Cast ruthlessly away by a trifling, shallow, frivolous and
freckle-minded race!
It is no more than right that Sterling P. Rounds should know this. How
it will gall his proud heart to know how his beautiful books, and
his chatty and spicy Congressional Record are treated by a jeering,
heartless throng! Do you suppose that I would perspire over doubtful
copy night after night, and then tread a job printing press all the next
day printing books at which the bloodless, soulless public sneered, and
the broad-browed talent of a cruel generation spit upon? Not exactly.
I have a moderate amount of patience and self-control, but I am free
to say right here before the world, that if I had been in Mr. Rounds'
place, and had at great cost erected a scientific work upon "The Rise
and Fall of Botts in America," and a flippant nation of scoffers had
utilized that volume to press autumn leaves and scraggly ferns in, I
would rise in my proud might and mash the forms with a mallet, I would
jerk the lever of the Washington press into the middle of the effulgent
hence. I would kick over my case, wipe the roller on the frescoed walls,
and feed my statistics, to the hungry flames.
No publisher has ever been treated more shabbily; no compositor has, in
the history of literature, been more rudely disregarded and derided.
Think of this, dear reader, when you look carelessly over the brief
but wonderful career of the hop-louse, or with apparent _ennui_ dawdle
through the treatise on colic among silk-worms, and facial neuralgia
among fowls.
This will not only please Mr. Rounds, the young and struggling
compositor, but it will gratify and encourage all the friends of
American progress and the lovers of learning throughout our whole land.