THE GROWTH AND CONDUCT OF A NEWSPAPER.
Frith Times has celebrated the appemance of its Forty- Thousandth Number in a manner worthy of its great history. It has specially identified itself with the history of that art of printing in which it has been so conspicuous a pioneer. Printing was the means by which the first John Walter was saved from the ruin consequent on his losses as an underwriter during the American war. He had already established a character which earned the full confidence of his creditors—they appointed him to liquidate his own bankruptcy—but he had to begin the world again at 46, with a wife and six children to support and nothing to look to save a printing patent which he. had just bought. The man who sold it to him "turned out to be a swindler," but the invention—the sub- stitution of types "representing whole words instead of individual letters "—had real merits. For that very reason it encountered the hostility of other printers and of the booksellers, and, what was possibly even more fatal, the dislike of George III. to a subscrip- tion list which contained the name of Benjamin Franklin. But in 1784 Walter had already bought the premises in Printing House Square which bad been occupied by the King's Printers till 1770, and had remained vacant since that time. It is an interesting link between the two periods of Walter's career that the purchase money was drawn from a present made to him by his creditors on the winding-up of his bankruptcy. Here on January 1st, 1785, was born the humble sheet which was first known as The Daily Universal Begisler, and three years later became the Times. At this date Walter was still improving his patent, the Logographic press, and "Printed Logographi- cally " appeared for some time in the title of the new paper. In the end the first invention, associated with the name of Walter, was silently abandoned. But with another John Walter, "the second son of the founder of the Times, and the real founder of its greatness," came a new development. On November 29th, 1814, the Times announced the introduction of a system of machinery which, "while it relieves the human frame of its most laborious efforts in printing, far exceeds all human powers in rapidity and despatch.' From that day the progress has been continuous. In 1814 the Koenig press, wonder- ful as it then seemed, could only produce 1,100 impressions per hour of a sheet of four pages. In 1827 a machine produced by Applegath and Cowper, two ingenious in- ventors whom Walter had taken into his employ, proved capable of printing 5,000 copies per hour. In 1848 Applegath produced the first rotary machine on which it was possible to print 10,000 copies in an hour. In 1858 the Hoe machine was brought over from America, and used concurrently with the Applegath until in 1868 both were superseded. by the introduction of "the famous and even epoch-making Walter press, . . . devised and con- structed entirely in the Times office." Instead of the 1,100 copies per hour of the four-page paper of 1814 we have the sixteen-page Times of to-day printed at the rate of 150,000 copies per hour.
This part of the growth of the Times admits of being expressed in figures. The wonderful organization which brings together each morning the news of the whole world is less capable of description. On some days—" black and nerve-racking times," they are justly termed— "nothing less than six whole issues of the paper would accommodate the overflow of the flood that pours un- ceasingly into the editorial rooms." When we recall the hopeless sensation with which a mere mortal contemplates the Special Numbers, one of which will sometimes contain reading matter "equivalent to that in two and a half ordinary books," we cannot but be grateful to the forbear- ance which has led the Times to recognize that "the reading capacity of man has limitations." The admission has been unwillingly extorted, since it is not due to any shortcomings in the mechanical task of production or to any paltry con- siderations of economy. What keeps, and we trust will continue to keep, the Times within its present limits is the hard fact that the average paper of twenty pages, "which is issued on every week day in the year, has a type space which is equal to two ordinary novels," while a thirty-six page paper "has the equivalent of three and a half." We are grateful indeed to the great journal for all that it gives us, but at times there comes over us a vision of a yet greater boon in the shape of one more daily supplement which in a single sheet of four or even two pages shall contain the very marrow of all the rest. Till then each reader must make his own choice, and cheer himself with the recollection of how often something which, left to himself, he might have passed over has proved the first link in a chain of events of the most vital moment. There was a time when "the world was so small, the sources of news were BO few, that one man could. reasonably survey the whole field and stand as the interpreter of all knowledge to his constituents." Those were the blissful days when an editor might stamp an impress of himself on each successive issue of his paper. Now the production of a great newspaper is like the work of a Department of State. The edifice built up by. the editor and the staff of the Times is "buttressed at every point by the work of the correspondents of all the News Associations. And when it is considered that each one of all these thousands of workers is in his degree a trained writer and a trained observer and interpreter of news—each one a man of parts and education—it is probably safe to say that there is no other institution in the world, no depart- ment of any Government, which needs and is daily fed by so great a volume of talent of so high an order." There is something else, however, which it is equally safe to say. It is that this vast extension of the area of newspaper enterprise has proportionately increased the difficulty of an editor's task. He has each night to determine the line of his paper from a rough comparison between these various sources of information, to weigh one correspondent's inter- pretation against another's, to resift and sift again "the product which pours daily into the office." This is the hardest and the most responsible part of an editor's duties, but over and above this there is the daily consideration how many pages the paper of the next morning shall contain, the allotment of space among the various depart- ments, and the decision from which the room demanded by some political crisis or acute foreign situation, some terrifying catastrophe or, perhaps, the death of an eminent man, shall be taken at the last moment. It is no wonder if, when an editor goes home after a night so spent, his brain is only equal—so at least it has been darkly hinted— to a solitary game of Patience before he goes to bed. Upon one, and that the most interesting, side of editorial work this Special Number, in itself a monument of labour and research, is necessarily silent. We are allowed to see the editor and the staff engaged in what must by comparison be called the mechanical production of the Times. What the reader would like to know is, what governs the ideas and principles to which this huge machine daily gives publication — how large a part of a leading article is due to the writer and how much to the editor, and, less known and more momentous still, how far the dim but not unsubstantial form of the proprietor intervenes in the resolution at which the editor eventually arrives. These are the real mysteries of a great newspaper office—mysteries which even those who move among them cannot always explain even to themselves. Who shall say what precise part this or that influence plays in determining the line taken on a great public question ? It is a resultant of many forces— forces which can at best be guessed at by those who welcome or wonder at the next morning's leader. One testimony, however, the Times has fairly earned. Among the many changes, whether of editor or of proprietor, it has pre- served one uniform characteristic. It has been Liberal at one time and Conservative at another, but on no occasion of real moment has it put out of sight the con- sideration how the King's Government is to be carried on. We will take a. single and recent example. A con- siderable section of Liberals, reinforced by some Unionists, have done their utmost to discredit the foreign policy of the present Government. In Morocco, in Tripoli, and, above all, in Persia, every act of Sir Edward Grey has been subjected to a minute and captious criticism. Had the inmates of this little cave found their attacks supportAl by the Times they would have gained both in boldness and in numbers ; and in a Cabinet in which there is at least the amount of diversity of opinion ordinarily to be found wherever twenty men of varying principles and antecedents are brought together, this addition to their strength might have made Sir Edward Grey's position hard to maintain. The hostility of the Times to the party at present in office must sometimes have tempted its conductors to adopt this form of attack, but they have uniformly set the permanent interests of the nation before those of any temporary combination of persons. That is the conduct of a great newspaper and of one of which its countrymen are rightly proud.
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