good old city. In those days newspapers were not so numerous as now. When
the Revolutionary War closed there were forty-three papers in the country.
We did not give such crowded or so large sheets as are now published. My
paper, though, was so popular all the spare copies were taken, and I have
none by me this moment; but here is a copy of the 'New England Chronicle,'
that came out in Boston on the 4th of July, 1776. It has four pages, you
will see, measures ten inches by fifteen, say, and each page has three
columns. It was not easy work then to publish a paper. We had no
steam-presses, but hand-power had to do the work, and my arms ache to this
day. It was hard, too, at the time of the Revolutionary War, to get paper,
and before the war, too. In 1769 there was only one paper-mill in New
England, and that was at Milton, Mass. They had to advertise for rags, and
what they called the bell-cart went through Boston picking them up. Then
in towns like Salem, Charlestown, Portsmouth, they scraped all they could.
Ten years after, my brother-publisher, of the 'Massachusetts Spy,'
appealed to the 'fair Daughters of Liberty in this extensive country' to
save their rags, and so 'serve their country,' advising them to hang up a
bag in one corner of a room that the odds and ends might be saved. For a
pound of 'clean white rags' the ladies could get ten shillings! If you had
lived then, and had your mother's rags to-day, what heaps of money you
could have made! It was hard, too, for us newspaper men to get news. I was
looking yesterday at a copy of the 'Portsmouth Oracle,' published in 1805.
That was in this wonderful century. What did it say on the 26th of
January? 'News by telegraph?' and did it tell us what the Hottentots were
doing yesterday? No; it said, 'By the mails,' and had one item from Boston
two days old, two from New York nine days old, and one from Fredericksburg
about a trouble with the colored people, and that news was twenty-three
days old! Rags and news, those two things, how hard they were to get! And
then, ladies and gentlemen, how hard it was to get our pay! A brother
editor in New York, in 1777, told his customers he must charge them, for