[1] As I write this, I take a copy of the Chicago “Tribune” of the day, and find, by actual calculation, that it contains reading matter, exclusive of advertisements, equivalent to more than 350 pages of Bancroft. Among this matter is a profoundly thoughtful speech by Horace Greeley, delivered hundreds of miles distant the night before. Other cities of the republic have been little if any behind the commercial and financial metropolis, excepting only the city of Washington whose most successful journalism of the old school has given way at last till quite recently to a series of wretched failures. Editorials of a journal published in the largest city of our Lake country, which was a straggling hamlet when Dr. Livingstone first went to Africa, have been known to make the proudest speculators of Wall street tremble, and powerful corporations to abandon long-conceived schemes of injustice. In an exhaustive article on the United States census of 1860, the New York “Tribune” said of the public press: “The very great increase in the circulation of newspapers and periodicals during the last ten years is an evidence at once of a high degree of popular intelligence and of a high standard of journalistic ability. There is no doubt that this country has the best, and the best sustained public press in the world--the best, we mean, for the people and not merely the learned few. Newspapers penetrate to every part of the country, reach even the most obscure hamlet, and find their way to almost every household. Printing offices go with the vanguard of civilization toward the west, and in the ‘new country’ are about as numerous as the mills. The dailies of the great cities cannot be carried by the government mails; they have created, during the decade, an entirely new line of business, supporting thousands of families; on issues fairly joined they have defeated many of the most maturely considered measures of Congressional Committees.” Having given the statistics in regard to the number and circulation of the periodicals and papers of the country at the time under examination, the article goes on to say: “The total number of daily papers thrown from the press during the year is about half that of all the other papers and periodicals combined. Supposing each one to weigh an ounce, the weight of the whole number of daily papers printed in the United States during the year of the census was 28,644,678 pounds avoirdupois--enough to load 14,322 wagons with a ton each, or to make a train of them seventy miles in length. Were all the papers and periodicals printed in 1860 placed in such a train, it would reach from New York to Richmond. Should they be pasted into one vast sheet, they would make a covering for the continent, and leave a remnant large enough to shut out the sun from the British Islands.