The character, of the work he was noticing led him at the beginning of his paper into some reflections on the part played by newspapers in modern times, and the stimulus given to national sensitiveness by the quick transmission of news. “It is no trifling matter,” he says, “that thirty millions of men should be thinking the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time, and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never heard of Cæsar, or of Cæsar’s murder; but the shot that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still with his shout. What is Beethoven’s ‘Funeral March for the Death of a Hero’ to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?”