In Canada, the century shows a highly complimentary growth in newspaper literature and influence. Great pride is taken in accurate and able editorship, and in that kind of management which is best calculated to convert investment into permanent and profitable property. What they lack on the reportorial, or strictly newsy, side, they make up in free, clean, and independent discussion. The people are readers and, therefore, generous supporters of the enterprises designed to supply them with their periodical literature. During the century the newspapers and periodicals of Canada increased in number from a very few to 862, as reported in 1894. Of these, 87 are dailies, 583 weeklies, 138 monthlies, 3 tri-weeklies, 22 semi-weeklies, 6 bi-weeklies, 21 semi-monthlies, 2 quarterlies. The largest centres of circulation are the province of Ontario with 507 newspapers and periodicals, and Quebec with 132. The century’s grandest field for journalistic opportunity has been the United States. Here journalism has developed with the greatest rapidity, exemplified its manifold features to the fullest extent, most successfully proved its influence as an educative and civilizing agency. Starting with the great and essential encouragement of freedom, it has found unremitting and energetic propulsion in the unprecedented growth of population, in the marvelous activities requiring intercommunication of thought, in an intelligence which constantly recruited armies of omnivorous readers, and in facilities for the preparation and dissemination of the literature at command. The beginning of newspaper enterprise in the United States was in Boston, in 1690, when the “Publick Occurrences” appeared under the auspices of Benjamin Harris. It was designed to be a monthly, and was printed on three sides of a folded sheet, each side being only eleven inches long by seven wide. It was suppressed after its first issue by the colonial government of Massachusetts, thus restricting the avenues of news to the foreign journals or local coffee-houses. But the demand for home news was not thus to be crushed. There sprang up a medium of communication by news-letters, such as then existed in England; and in 1704 the postmaster of Boston undertook to keep certain functionaries informed of the course of events by a periodical news-letter in printed form. This he called “The News-Letter,” a title which, with some, is treated as that of a newspaper. It was to appear weekly, and would be sent to subscribers for such reasonable sum as might be agreed upon. After a lapse of fifteen years, without competition, it had attained a subscription list of only three hundred copies. A subsequent postmaster started an opposition sheet in 1719, called “The Boston Gazette.” Its appearance caused him to lose his office, but the rival papers continued to exist, “The News-Letter” up to the evacuation of Boston by the British troops in 1776, and the “Gazette” up to 1754.