We are all of us in the habit of saying in our every-day life, that
"We never know the value of anything until we lose it." Let us try
the newsvendors by the test. A few years ago we discovered one
morning that there was a strike among the cab-drivers. Now, let us
imagine a strike of newsmen. Imagine the trains waiting in vain
for the newspapers. Imagine all sorts and conditions of men dying
to know the shipping news, the commercial news, the foreign news,
the legal news, the criminal news, the dramatic news. Imagine the
paralysis on all the provincial exchanges; the silence and
desertion of all the newsmen's exchanges in London. Imagine the
circulation of the blood of the nation and of the country standing
still,--the clock of the world. Why, even Mr. Reuter, the great
Reuter--whom I am always glad to imagine slumbering at night by the
side of Mrs. Reuter, with a galvanic battery under his bolster,
bell and wires to the head of his bed, and bells at each ear--think
how even he would click and flash those wondrous dispatches of his,
and how they would become mere nothing without the activity and
honesty which catch up the threads and stitches of the electric
needle, and scatter them over the land.

It is curious to consider--and the thought occurred to me this day,
when I was out for a stroll pondering over the duties of this
evening, which even then were looming in the distance, but not
quite so far off as I could wish--I found it very curious to
consider that though the newsman must be allowed to be a very
unpicturesque rendering of Mercury, or Fame, or what-not
conventional messenger from the clouds, and although we must allow
that he is of this earth, and has a good deal of it on his boots,
still that he has two very remarkable characteristics, to which
none of his celestial predecessors can lay the slightest claim.