Day by day the world is growing smaller and men larger. But a few years ago the State of New York was as large as the United States is to-day. It required as much time to reach Albany from New York as it now requires to reach San Francisco from the same city, and so far as the transmission of thought goes the world is but a hamlet. I count as one of the great good things of the modern press--as one of the specific good things--that the same news, the same direction of thought is transmitted to many millions of people each day. So that the thoughts of multitudes of men are substantially tending at the same time along the same direction. It tends more and more to make us citizens in the highest sense of the term, and that is the reason that I have so much respect for the press. Of course I know that the news and opinions are written by folks liable to the same percentage of error as characterizes all mankind. No one makes no mistakes but the man who knows everything--no one makes no mistakes but the hypocrite. I must confess, however, that there are things about the press of to-day that I would have changed--that I do not like. I hate to see brain the slave of the material god. I hate to see money own genius. So I think that every writer on every paper should be compelled to sign his name to everything he writes. There are many reasons why he has a right to the reputation he makes. His reputation is his property, his capital, his stock in trade, and it is not just or fair or right that it should be absorbed by the corporation which employs him. After giving great thoughts to the world, after millions of people have read his thoughts with delight, no one knows this lonely man or his solitary name. If he loses the good will of his employer, he loses his place and with it all that his labor and time and brain have earned for himself as his own inalienable property, and his corporation or employer reaps the benefit of it. There is another reason establishing the absolute equity of this proposition, a reason pointing in other directions than to the writer and his rights. It is no more than right to the reader that the opinion or the narrative should be that of Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown or Mr. So and So, and not that of, say, the _Picayune_. That is too impersonal. It is no more than right that a single man should have his honor at stake for what is said, and not an impersonal something. I know that we are all liable to believe it if the _Picayune_ says it, and yet, after all, it is the individual man who is saying it and it is in the interest of justice that the reader be apprised of the fact.