PRINTERS.
The printer's case used to be one of the highways to editorial and
congressional honors; but the little fellows of the craft invented a
machine which goes over it like a "header" over a wheat-field and leaves
a dead level of stalks, all minus the heads, so that no tall fellows are
left to shame them by passing on from the "stick" to the tripod or
speaker's mallet. Their great Union rolling-pin flattens them all out
like pie-crust, and tramps are not overshadowed by the superiority of
industrious men. But the leveling process makes impassable mountains and
gorges in other walks of life--makes it necessary that a publisher with
one hundred readers must pay as much for type-setting as he with a
hundred thousand. The salary of editors and contributors may vary from
nothing to ten thousand a year; but through all mutations of this life,
the printer's wages must remain in _statu quo_. So the Union kills small
papers, prevents competition in the newspaper business, builds up
monster establishments, and keeps typos at the case forever and a day.
I knew when the _Visiter_ started that it could not live and pay for
type-setting the same price as paid by the New York _Tribune_, and the
day the office became mine, I stated that fact to the printers, who took
their hats and left. In '52, I had spent some part of every day for two
weeks in a composing room, and with the knowledge then acquired, I, in
'58 started the business of practical printer. I took a proof of my
first stick, and lo, it read from right to left. I distributed that, but
had to mark the stick that I might remember.
The first day I took two boys as apprentices. First, Wesley Miller, who
had spent two months in a Harrisburg office, and knew something of the
art, but did not like anything about it except working the press.
Second, my nephew, William B. Mitchell, who was thirteen, knew nothing
of types, but was a model of patient industry.
Our magnanimous printers hung around hotels, laughing at the absurdity
of this amateur office. We might set type, but when it came to making
and locking up a form, ha, ha, wouldn't there be sport? That handsome
new type would all be a mess of pi, then somebody would be obliged to
come to their terms or St. Cloud would be without a paper. It was their
great opportunity to display their interest in the general welfare, and
they embraced it to the full; but of the little I had learned in that
short apprenticeship six years ago, I retained a clear conception of the
principles of justification by works. I brought these to bear on those
forms, made them up, locked them, and sent for Stephen Miller to carry
them to the press, when each one lifted like a paving stone; but alas,
alas, the columns read from right to left. I unlocked them, put the
matter back in the galleys, made them up new, and we had the paper off
on time.
From that time until the first of January, '63, I carried on the
business of practical printer, issued a paper every week, did a large
amount of job work, was city and county printer for half a dozen
counties, did all the legal advertising, published the tax lists, and
issued extras during the Indian massacres.