Alfred Baker

“ Though overwhelmed by taxation, enjoying none of the present facilities, mechanical or locomotive, for attaining a wide circulation, and without the stimulus which the support of the great mass of the people gives, there was a literary excellence about the press contributions of that day which has not been surpassed, even if it has been equaled, in later and more favored times. ”

“ Nathaniel Butter, as the father of our English newspapers, deserves to rank next to Caxton in the honorable roll of names associated with the English press. In the seventeenth century the rulers in Church and State were not favorable to the free circulation of information or the free expression of opinion. Some courage must have been required to start the first newspaper in the time of the Star Chamber, and when the penalties likely to be exacted on the person of an offending printer were whipping, the pillory, imprisonment, degradation of various kinds, mutilation, and even death. ”

“ In 1695 the country grew tired of a muzzled Press, and the law was abolished. Some politicians, however, still hankered after the censorship, but Hallam states that "the less courtly Whigs combined with the Tories and Jacobites to defeat " the resuscitation of the censorship. Sir Roger l'Estrange, who for almost a generation had persecuted the English Press by the infliction of brutal punishments, happily long since obsolete, met with poetic justice. ”

“ The century closes with a piece of retrograde press legislation which led to many prosecutions, entitled "A Bill for preventing the mischief arising from newspapers being printed and published by persons unknown, and of regulating them in these respects." ”

“ Englishmen, now far removed from the partizan strife of the period can, however, never contemplate but with unmixed pleasure many of the productions which emanated from the newspaper and periodical press of the century under notice. ”

“ Though there was, of course, less general demand for newspapers than in later years, owing to a large section of the people being without education, yet, as the result of taxation, surreptitious endeavors—often attended with success for a time—were made to supply the people with cheap newspapers. ”

“ In the present competitive age, the Courant's self-denying principle is, alas, no longer observed, and some daily papers give their readers more matter in a day than the Courant did in a year. Though this paper has not survived till the present time, there are twelve newspapers still published in different parts of the country which saw the light in the first twenty years of the eighteenth century and bear witness to the journalistic activity of the period. ”

“ It was a century and a half after William Caxton set up the first printing press in England that Nathaniel Butter printed the first weekly newspaper. News was probably disseminated by means of the printing press some time earlier, but not generally by private enterprise. In Queen Elizabeth's time, for example, the Government seems to have distributed printed intelligence about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but private effort in this direction was practically stifled. As Macaulay tells us, "No man could print without a licence ”

“ Their names, their numbers; how they rise and fall.
Crabbe. RELIEVED from the restrictions of the censorship, the closing years of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century witnessed a great development of newspaper enterprise. During the reign of William and Mary, and in the early years of Anne, the English Press enjoyed, in fact, a freedom from Government control and taxation denied to it for the century and a half which followed the imposition of the Stamp Duty. ”

“ He was himself sent to Newgate about this time for giving publicity to treasonable papers, and ended his life ignobly.
↑ The London Gazette is the most profitable of the newspapers owned by the nation, yielding at the present time a revenue of from £16,000 to £17,000 yearly. Its editorship at a salary of £800 was formerly given to some gentleman connected with the Press who had done important party service to the Government of the day. ”

“ In attempting to describe in a compendious fashion the origin and growth of an institution so important, it is hardly possible to do other than take the readei over a well-trodden road, but the effort shall at least be made to point out milestones of progress hitherto, it ma> be, overlooked, while essaying to give a clear view of thd* striking features observable in each stage of the onward journey. ”