What helped very much to keep the peace in the small town of Dessau, as it did all over Germany, nay, all over the world, till about the year 1848, was the small number of newspapers. In my childhood and youth their number was very small. In Dessau I only knew of one, which was then called the _Wochenblatt_, afterwards the _Staatsanzeiger_. At that time newspapers were really read for the news which they contained, not for leading or misleading articles and all the rest. What a happy time it was when a newspaper consisted of a sheet, or half a sheet in quarto, with short paragraphs about actual events, which had often taken place weeks and months before. A battle might have been fought in Spain or Turkey, in India or China, and no one knew of it till some official information was vouchsafed by the respective Governments or by Jewish bankers. War-correspondents or regular reporters did not exist, and the old telegraphic dispatches were sent by wooden telegraphs fixed on high towers, which from a distance looked like gallows on which a criminal was hanging and gesticulating with arms and feet. Anybody who watched these signals could decipher them far more easily than a hieroglyphic inscription. The peace of Europe, nay, of the whole world, was then in the keeping of sovereigns and their ministers, and Prince Metternich might certainly take some credit for having kept what he called the Thirty Years’ Peace. Shall we ever, as long as there are newspapers, have peace again—peace between the great nations of the world, and peace at home between contending parties, and peace in our mornings at home which are now so ruthlessly broken in upon, nay, swallowed up by those paper-giants, most unwelcome yet irresistible callers, just when we want to settle down to a quiet day’s work? It is no use protesting against the inevitable, nor can we quite agree with those who maintain that no newspaper carries the slightest weight or exercises the smallest influence on home or foreign politics. A very influential statesman and wise thinker used to say that we should never have had Christianity if newspapers had existed at the time of Augustus. When unsuccessful _littérateurs_ or bankrupt bankers’ clerks were the chief contributors to the newspapers, their influence might have been small; but when Bismarcks turned journalists, and Gortchakoffs prompted, newspapers could hardly be called _quantités négligeables_.