ve the financial and publishing
department in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureaus
for folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.

On the second floor--but that you will shortly behold, and it will
describe itself.

On the third floor you would discover immense magazines of
material--paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every known
description; and all in quantities seemingly as useless as incalculable.

On the fourth and fifth floors you would find the composition rooms,
whence fly the winged words all over the world, peopled by its whole
army of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases,
"click--click--click" is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alone
in those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add that
the entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed in
tubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete,
and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century in
Paris. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton,
three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every object
and apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night--through
all the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive--and
the journal issues with the dawn--and the workmen are relieved by
constant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment to
hundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusive
of their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in the
commercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents,
sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twenty
pressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundred
distributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attaches and
employes too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation of
this army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is nine
millions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand copies daily, and
each number is read by half a million people, and through their
influence by half a million more.

The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has
been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the
second--nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of
all three united equals not its tithe; and its position--its
rank!--royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past