Development of the Free Press. 23 that the reading public is now co-extensive with the nation. In Mr Walter Besant's " Fifty Years Ago ; or the Queen's Accession," a sketch is given of a group in a country town, where the stage coach has just arrived, assembled around a man reading a paper aloud. The picture bears the inscription, " Arrival of the Coronation number of the Sun — one paper and one man who can read it in the town." Now, happily, not one man but every man in the town can read his newspaper. Not only so, but every town has its own newspaper, and generally two, so that neither political party may suffer from being unrepresented. Of the causes which have especially led to the growth of the Daily Press during the last half of the Victorian era, a prominent place must be assigned to the development of rapid machine printing and also to the acquirement of the telegraphic system of the country by the Government, with the establishment of a cheap uniform rate for the trans- mission of news. On the introduction of the Government telegraphic scheme, in 1868, at least a dozen daily papers came into existence in the United Kingdom down to 1870. In the next decade no less than forty dailies were estab- lished, which, to some extent at any rate, owed their incep- tion to the cheapness of the telegraphic supplies of news from the different agencies. Since 1880, a remarkable impulse has been given to the establishment of evening newspapers by the growing popularity of this class of journalism, and of the fifty additional daily papers started between the date just mentioned and the present time, nearly all are evening journals. These figures relate to new papers ; if weeklies converted to dailies were added, the number would be greater. Few will gainsay that the journalists of our own country have made an honest and a generous use of their freedom in the interests of the public. Enough has surely been said to show that the Earl of Carnarvon was well within
