In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one shilling for each advertisement. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851. Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes political opinion. Existing convictions are deepened. But the average reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a second _Times_, as since 1788 the older _Universal Register_ has been called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion. So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected with the name of the first proprietor of the _Athenæum_, like its latest, a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age the _Daily News_, to which the short editorship of Charles Dickens gave literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors, Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S. Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, the _Daily Telegraph_, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired, enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners. It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds, notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to the _Times_ from the Crimea of William Howard Russell, first caused the Sebastopol enquiry;--then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion[95] and with it the fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the great London dailies be below the mark of that of the two _Couriers_ and some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker, a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which other periodicals of Europe can show.