The power and wealth of the newspaper of to-day is explained, in no small measure, by the battles of the Civil War, that kindled the interest of millions who had never before read the daily newspaper, but who became after the first battle students of God's book of daily events. During those terrible days men slept in dread and wakened in fear as to what might have happened on the Potomac or the Mississippi. Out of these tumultuous conditions the Sunday newspaper was born. Before the battle of Bull Run people of New York and Chicago frowned upon the Sunday newspaper, just as the people of London and Edinburgh to-day will have none of it. But when there were a million men in arms and the whole land trembled with the thunder of cannon and the stroke of battle, anxious parents, fearful wives, knowing that the conflict was on, when Saturday's sun set felt that they could not wait till Monday morning for news from the front. But if the war did much for the press, newspaper men did much for liberty. To supply the people of the country with news from the field, a veritable army of war correspondents was organized, a telegraphic service was organized and built up, plans were laid that developed into the Associated Press. This telegraphic service became a vast and shining web lying all over this land, with wires that trembled by night and day, flashing out now despair, and now hope, to innumerable hearts. Liberty owes a great debt to the press, for it assembled all the people in one vast speaking chamber, and told them how events were going with the slave and the Union. If we are to appreciate fully the place of the press during the anti-slavery epoch, we must recall the conditions of American life in the olden time. When the colonies revolted and published their Declaration there were in the United States only forty-three newspapers, most of them weeklies. There were fourteen papers in New England, four in New York State, two in Virginia, two in Carolina and nine in Pennsylvania. The entire forty-three papers, however, held less printed matter than any ten pages of our morning journals. The papers of that time contained no editorials, and were strictly purveyors of the gossip and news of the week, with rude advertisements--now a cut of a horse that had strayed, an apprentice that had escaped, a slave that had run away, enlivened, indeed, by frantic and pathetic appeals for the subscribers to pay up their dues. There were no public libraries, no reading rooms, no inns where men could go on winter evenings and read the papers.