has resulted from the discovery of the process of making paper from wood pulp .45
Increase in circulation has been followed by the demand for increasing facilities in distribution and this has been met by the perfecting of great distributing agencies, as those of the English house of W . H . Smith and Son and the American News Com pany .46
All of these inventions and improvements in the collection of copy, in its transmutation into the newspaper , and in the facility with which thenewspaper is placed in the hands of the reader have made the newspaper a great business enterprise and at the same time they have thereby increased enormously its sphere of influence. It is on this business side that the greatest development of the press is being made to -day. Works are constantly appearing on newspaper management, newspaper book -keeping and accounts , the publication of weeklies, book -keeping for weeklies ,
newspaper efficiency, on advertising in all its forms, and on every phase of the newspaper as a business enterprise.47 So much in evidence is this side of the newspaper thatmany persons have been apprehensive lest it constitute a real danger to freedom of the press. If the content of the newspaper is to be subordinated to the business management concerned only in efficiency for the sake of larger circulation, more advertising, and
45 The ability to control the supply of print paper through the control of pulp mills has been an element of power in the hands of certain repre sentatives of the press. See H . W . Steed , The Hapsburg Monarchy , pp .
190 - 191; W . E . Carson , Northcliffe , pp . 130- 133 ; F . A . McKenzie, “ The
Transformation of Newfoundland,” The Mystery of the Daily Mail, pp. 41- 48.
46 H . Maxwell, Life and Times of the Right Honourable William Henry Smith , 2 vols., 1893. The American News Company unfortunately does not print any de
scription of its work nor has apparently any descriptive article relating to it found its way into any American periodical. In striking contrast with these methods of distribution is the account
strikhomas,a nein Lancaste I n r of E . S . Thomas, a nephew of Isaiah his father who lived in
Thomas, who writes of the effort of Lancaster, Massachusetts, to get subscribers to
newspapers at the close of the Revolutionary War. He secured fifty -two subscribers who took turns in going sixteen miles to Worcester for them . When his father 's turn came, the boy , eight years old , was mounted on
horseback and sent for the papers, the journey there and back taking two days. — Reminiscences of the Last Sixty - five Years, II , 4 - 5 .
47 This side of the question has been comprehensively put forward by
Jason Rogers, in Newspaper Building, 1918
