America have escaped all danger of ever falling under the
dominion of a paper despot. There will never be a Times in America.
Twenty years ago the New York news and the New York newspaper reached
distant cities at the same moment; but since the introduction of the
telegraph, the news outstrips the newspaper, and is given to the
public by the local press. It is this fact which forever limits the
circulation and national importance of the New York press. The New
York papers reach a village in Vermont late in the afternoon,--six,
eight, ten hours after a carrier has distributed the Springfield
Republican; and nine people in ten will be content with the brief
telegrams of the local centre. At Chicago, the New York paper is forty
hours behind the news; at San Francisco, thirty days; in Oregon,
forty. Before California had been reached by the telegraph, the New
York newspapers, on the arrival of a steamer, were sought with an
avidity of which the most ludicrous accounts have been given. If the
news was important and the supply of papers inadequate, nothing was
more common than for a lucky newsboy to dispose of his last sheets at
five times their usual price. All this has changed. A spirited local
press has anticipated the substance of the news, and most people wait
tranquilly for the same local press to spread before them the
particulars when the tardy mail arrives. Even the weekly and
semi-weekly editions issued by the New York daily press have probably
reached their maximum of importance; since the local daily press also
publishes weekly and semi-weekly papers, many of which are of high
excellence and are always improving, and have the additional
attraction of full local intelligence. If some bold Yankee should
invent a method by which a bundle of newspapers could be shot from New
York to Chicago in half an hour, it would certainly enhance the
importance of the New York papers, and diminish that of the rapidly
expanding and able press of Chicago. Such an invention is possible;
nay, we think it a probability. But even in that case, the local news,
and, above all, the local advertising, would still remain as the basis
of a great, lucrative, honorable, and very attractive business.

We believe, however, that if the local press were annihilated, and
this whole nation lived dependent upon the press of a single city,
still we should be safe from a paper despotism; because the power of
the editorial lessens as the intelligence of