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present to the world the sublime spectacle of a free people governing itself by just laws, and rejoicing in the purity of its original republican institutions.
The newspaper press is one of the most extraordinary features in the United States. Its influence is omnipresent. Every party in religion, polities, or morals, speaks, not by one, but by fifty organs; and every nicely defined shade of opinion has its voices also. Every town of large size has from ten to twenty daily papers, every village has its three or four; and even a collection of huts produces its one "daily," or two or three "weeklies." These prints start into existence without any fiscal restrictions: there is neither stamp nor paper duty. Newspapers are not a luxury, as with us, but a necessary of life. They vary in price from one halfpenny to three-pence, and no workman who could afford his daily bread would think of being without his paper. Hundreds of them are sold in the hotels at breakfast-time; and in every steamer and railway car, from the Atlantic ocean to the western prairies, the traveller is assailed by newsboys with dozens of them for sale. They are bought in hundreds everywhere, and are greedily devoured by men, women, and children. Almost as soon as the locality of a town is chosen, a paper starts into life, which always has the effect of creating an antagonist.
The newspapers in the large cities spare no expense in obtaining, either by telegraph or otherwise, the earliest intelligence of all that goes on in the world. Every item of English news appears in the journals, from the movements of the court to those of the literati; and a weekly summary of parliamentary intelligence is always given. Any