owes a great debt to the press, for it assembled all the people in one
vast speaking chamber, and told them how events were going with the
slave and the Union.

If we are to appreciate fully the place of the press during the
anti-slavery epoch, we must recall the conditions of American life in
the olden time. When the colonies revolted and published their
Declaration there were in the United States only forty-three newspapers,
most of them weeklies. There were fourteen papers in New England, four
in New York State, two in Virginia, two in Carolina and nine in
Pennsylvania. The entire forty-three papers, however, held less printed
matter than any ten pages of our morning journals. The papers of that
time contained no editorials, and were strictly purveyors of the gossip
and news of the week, with rude advertisements--now a cut of a horse
that had strayed, an apprentice that had escaped, a slave that had run
away, enlivened, indeed, by frantic and pathetic appeals for the
subscribers to pay up their dues. There were no public libraries, no
reading rooms, no inns where men could go on winter evenings and read
the papers.

That which starved the newspaper was the lack of facilities for
distribution. It cost twenty-five cents to send a letter. Most of the
correspondents were widely separated lovers. Romeo, knowing that Juliet
would not be able to pay twenty-five cents for his weekly effusion,
learned the use of the cypher, and by means of a large circle on the
outside of the letter and a pink spot within it succeeded in conveying
certain mystic symbols of osculation, that told the story of undying
fidelity without paying the postman for the letter that was left in his
hands. The old postman who jogged along between Philadelphia and New
York spent three days on the trip, and put in his time knitting