George Henry Payne

“ My life has been one invariable series of efforts, useful to the world and honorable to myself—efforts to
create an honorable reputation during life, and to leave something after my death for which posterity will honor my memory. I am building up a newspaper establishment that will take the lead of all others that ever appeared in the world, in virtue, in morals, in science, in knowledge, in industry, in taste, in power, in influence. No public reputation can be lasting unless it is built on private character and virtue. ”

“ Among the commonest and least comprehended ingredients of living is the daily newspaper. More powerful than public school or college, more vitally affecting destiny than all the churches of all the sects, it thrusts its well or ill conceived messages into the homes and minds of the millions. Coral like, it has reared itself into an all encircling reef, upon which beats the tidal wave of world politics or laps the insignificant ripple of village chatter. The roar of the tidal wave and the lap of the ripple are what men think they hear. ”

“ During the brief period from the time of achieving independence to the adoption of the Constitution, there are to be severe tests of the metal of the people—it is to prove indeed the critical period in American history. It is unique in history as a period in which there was little other government than that by public opinion. The glory of that period was the adoption of a constitution that has made the American Republic a leader among nations. ”

“ No political advance has been made in this country without the aid of the press; all of our democratic achievements have been accomplished with the help of men who were, in the beginning, regarded as mere mechanics, poor printers, or who were, in later periods, grudgingly given credit and political recognition as the representatives of a not entirely welcome social and political phenomenon.
Journalism, in turn, owes to democracy its enjoyment of enormous privileges, its practical admission into the government. ”

“ You are to set forth, in compact form and in the most effective way possible, the facts of the case and the considerations that demand a popular or at least a public loan instead of this deal with a syndicate, suggestive as it is of the patent falsehood that the United States Treasury's credit needs ' financing.' You are to declare, with all possible emphasis, that the banks, bankers, and people of the United States stand ready and eager to lend their government all the money it wants at three per cent, interest, and to buy its four per cent, bonds at a premium that will amount to that. ”

“ As soon as the government stretched out it became, not a democracy but a tyranny.
What is plainly evident is that the printing press was invented at a time when people were becoming restive. They had progressed to a point where they were no longer satisfied with the old servitude. Once given an invention by which man's thoughts might be communicated to others with a minimum of labor and expense, journalism was inevitable. The humblest effort to make it effective, such as that of Benjamin Harris, thus becomes an important page in our history. ”

“ In the same year, 1754, that Franklin was proposing his Union of American Colonies, David Hume, who had felt the hollowness of the political philosophy that then dominated Europe, turned to America and, expressing a belief that must have been in the minds of other men, said, "The seeds of many a noble state have been sown in climates kept desolate by the wild manners of the ancient inhabitants, and an asylum is secure in that solitary world for liberty and science." ”

“ Had the idea of an academic training for journalists come from a college man or from one of the conservative journalists, it would doubtless have been just as successful, but it would have been less characteristic of the history of journalism; a history which abounds in curious human developments, in revelations of beauty of character, like those the wilderness traveler finds in unbeaten paths and deep woodland pools. ”

“ Expressed or unexpressed, there is always a strong belief that this country is different from others, and that the making of a happier and better nation is in the hands of each individual, working his own way. There is ever present, under cynical cover at times, the missionary spirit
— the sense of personal responsibility for the right conduct of our government and our people, a spirit that leads even to the greatest sacrifice. ”

“ The pity was that mere political manipulation kept Lincoln from close and sympathetic touch with the great journalist of his time—Horace Greeley. They should have been understanding friends; probably, but for Weed, they would have been. They had much in common, and the humble origin of both proves that great men are not born and left in the midst of the wilderness; rather are they born in the wilderness and transported by seeming miracles to the exact point where they are needed. ”

“ The Rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers' treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope for from a Union success,—that we mean in that case to sell them into bitterer bondage to defray the cost of the war. Let them impress this as a truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous bondmen, and the Union will never be restored—never. We cannot conquer Ten Millions of people united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. ”

“ His physical strength was completely undermined, his superb intellectual powers gave way. Before the expiration of the month which witnessed his crushing defeat he had gone to his rest. The controversies which had so recently divided the country were hushed in the presence of death; and all the people, remembering only his noble impulses, his great work for humanity, his broad
impress upon the age, united in honoring and mourning one of the most remarkable men in American history. ”

“ There is indeed an aesthetic charm in the simple and truthful recital of events in the world we live in — it may not be evident to those who soar high, those whose minds are attuned to the rhythm of greater beauties, but it is there; men know it, and carry that knowledge through life whether they have learned it in the grimy, unattractive office of some "patent-inside" weekly or, with greater force, as part of the large, keen organization that prints, in the small hours of the morning, a great metropolitan daily. ”

“ But slave labor took the place of the printing press, and the ingrained belief that reading as well as thinking belonged to the ruling class rendered the great organ of modern civilization unnecessary.
But the printing press came to awaken man to his possibilities—the philosophies of the ages sweeping down into the great under mass to awaken them to manhood—and one of the first evidences that the apparently inert majority, lying under the governmental impact, were shaking off the lethargy of brutedom, was the interest in "Newes," itself a new word. ”

“ From now on the history of journalism is not of its own struggles, but of the struggles of the ideas for which it stands. The thing itself is established. Henceforth it is a story of development; development in close connection with the idea of democracy, from which it sprang, to whose influence it owed its quick growth, and to which in turn it contributed as no other single factor in civilization, except Christianity, has contributed. ”

“ When a nation was born and the political thought of the philosophers of the eighteenth century had taken root, it was the press that made the battle for the extension of the suffrage and that wrested from the minority the power which, in a democracy, must be with the people. The abolition movement, variously explained, was a development of the democratic idea. What the statesmen of that time failed to realize was that there could not exist in a democracy a class, such as the slaveholders, claiming to have property rights in human beings. ”

“ In the Albany conference, Franklin, the printer and editor, was the one man of vision; he, a man of the people, was the leader; he who had come up from nothing, the prototype of the Greeley journaliststatesman, was the one man that made the conference a memorable gathering. Men who had hitherto looked down upon the press, who had regarded papers as "miserable sheets," began to see their usefulness. In the next chapter we see that these men did not disdain to use these sheets for the cause that they held sacred, leading the way for their later use by even the scholarly Jefferson and Hamilton. ”

“ This verdict in New York was an achievement for the freedom of the press, and so for the liberty of man, of which the colonies soon began to reap the benefit, and for which the thought and speech of mankind all over the globe are braver and more affluent of noble life. ”

“ As a matter of fact, it has been the West and not the East that, since the Civil War, has generated the power back of those reforms and those progressive measures that have developed and strengthened the democracy of the country. A racy people will always be nearer to the springs of government, and, being near the source, will carry out the ideas more vehemently and spontaneously, than a people steeped in tradition and custom. ”

“ Pulitzer was distinguished from most of his predecessors in journalism, not so much for his financial success, or for his sentimental treatment of the news, but by the fact that he saw that the Fourth Estate was so great a power in the country that the men who were to be its votaries should be trained, as well and as thoroughly as those who entered any of the other professions. It was this knowledge of the responsibility that is placed on every man in the profession that led him to suggest the school of journalism at Columbia University. ”

“ In democracy or in a government by public opinon, minorities are as powerful as they are right. Our greatest reforms are the work of minorities, our greatest advances the triumph of the far-seeing few. The American Revolution itself was a minority movement, and it was successful only when public opinion was aroused. Mill's doubts before the Civil War about the evil effect of slavery, as well as Bryce's just criticism of our municipal government, have all been answered as public opinion has been aroused. ”

“ The stale, impudent insinuations of slander and sedition, with which the gormandizers of power have endeavored to discredit your paper, are so much the more to your honor. ... And if the public interest, liberty, and happiness have been in danger from the ambition or avarice of any great man, whatever might be his politeness, address, learning, ingenuity, and, in other respects, integrity and humanity, you have done yourselves honor and your country service by publishing and pointing out that avarice and ambition. ”

“ But that there should spring up, overnight, as it were, another Estate, a power hitherto unknown,—a power which, in the language of Burke, should be more powerful than the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons combined,—was something that only the mind of a Burke could understand. We have seen that power born amid vicissitudes in the wilderness of newly settled colonies. Henceforth the history of the country is not of kings nor battles, but largely of that power and of those wielding it. ”

“ Hamilton was one of America's greatest statesmen, and, despite his disbelief in the rule of the masses, he did more, not only to establish and to safeguard a free press, but to develop it, than any other man has done. The political ideas with which his name was associated in later life were doomed to pass with the Federalist party, which had been identified with disbelief in the stability of purely popular government, but his influence as a journalist continued for generations and still continues. ”

“ From the time when Harris presumed to tell the government what it should not do in the matter of waging barbarous warfare, till the time when Greeley did tell the government what to do, when he became the most influential single figure in the selection of the country's presidents, there is a steady, never-failing progression. One might almost expect to find a blood descent from one to the other; indeed, the rise of journalistic power, from Harris to Greeley, moves with a precision such as marked the development of an ancient dynasty. ”

“ But whenever I shall, on the part of the Executive, see every consideration of public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice; when I shall behold men of real merit daily turned out of office, for no other cause but independency of spirit ”