To be worthy of a land like this, the newspapers also possess rare attractions for readers and advertisers, the latter especially. They are ‘alive and growing’ ‘newsy! pithy! spicy!’ one is a ‘paper for all mankind,’ another ‘overflows with local gossip,’ and a third ‘discusses public questions with lively respectability, and feeds its readers with no less than four and often five columns of spicy local matter each week;’ a fourth has ‘everything first-class;’ you can get ‘a bright and newsy wide-awake local paper,’ or ‘a live thirty-two column weekly;’ and the _Eaton Rapids Journal_ will be found, appropriately to its name, ‘a live paper in a live town.’ Yet more richly descriptive is the account of the ‘red-hot local paper that feeds twenty thousand people every week and makes them fat; advertisements can reach millions of hungry minds through this medium.’ Again, we learn that ‘Life on the ocean wave is nothing compared with reading the _Plymouth Pantograph_.’ The _Sacramento Bee_ is ‘the spiciest, ablest, most brilliant, and most independent journal published on the Pacific coast;’ while for ‘talking large,’ honourable mention should also be accorded to one of Cincinnati’s lights, which is ‘the best paper ever published. All its news is first-hand from upwards of fifteen hundred reporters and correspondents in every part of the United States and Europe.’ But these are mere outward characteristics and generalisations. Politics denote more distinctly the paper’s line of action, whether ‘stalwart Republican,’ ‘sound Democratic,’ or ‘Independent in all things, neutral in nothing.’ Independence is the cry of many; they are ‘bold and fearless,’ express a hatred of party, rings and ringsters. ‘Now in its third volume,’ exults one banner of freedom, ‘and has never halted by the way nor wearied of the fight. Always ready to take up the cause of the poor and oppressed, and never ready to surrender its independence to party, clique, or ring.’ ‘Has no axe to grind other than the advancement of every social reform,’ a second patriot proclaims. ‘Therefore it hits a head whenever that head is seen in opposition to true advancement.’ For the extremes of party violence we must go to a Southern journal, which does not, it may well be hoped, ‘speak as the masses of our people feel and talk;’ if it does, so much the worse for the people. ‘If the Yankees,’ this rodomontade begins, ‘want to know the real sentiments of our people; if they want to have a realising sense of the utter madness of trying to govern the grand old sovereign States of the Confederacy, they will close their ears to the lying professions of our policy-bumming politicians and subscribe to the _Bartlett News_.’ Perhaps some such rant as that of the _Bartlett News_ a certain _Labor Standard_ had in view while stating itself to be ‘not a blowing, blustering, black-mail sheet which has to be read in private because its contents are unfit to be seen in the family,’ but