exist as a thriving enterprise for one single twelvemonth? No,
ladies and gentlemen, the blundering stupidity of such an offence
would have no chance against the acute sagacity of newspaper
editors. But I will go further, and submit to you that its
commission, if it be to be dreaded at all, is far more likely on
the part of some recreant camp-follower of a scattered, disunited,
and half-recognized profession, than when there is a public opinion
established in it, by the union of all classes of its members for
the common good: the tendency of which union must in the nature of
things be to raise the lower members of the press towards the
higher, and never to bring the higher members to the lower level.

I hope I may be allowed in the very few closing words that I feel a
desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances, rather special,
attending my present occupation of this chair, to give those words
something of a personal tone. I am not here advocating the case of
a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I
hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went into the gallery of
the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy
not eighteen, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable
truth--nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a
reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home
in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate
conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my
shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest
accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a
young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by
the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping
through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the
then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time