nion was chiefly, though even then not wholly, expressed by a
single personality, sometimes dominant, able, unselfish, and in nature
a social prophet, but in most instances weak, time-serving, and
self-seeking, and partisan, with one eye on advertising, official
preferred, and the other on profits, public office, and other
contingent personal results.

In the complex society today, classified, stratified, organized, and
differentiated, the newspaper is a complex representation of this
life. The railroad is a far more important social agency than the
stagecoach. It carries more people; it offers the community more; but
the individual passenger counted for more in the eye of the traveling
public in the stagecoach than today in the railroad train; but nobody
would pretend to say that the railroad president was less important
than the head of a stage line, Mr. A. J. Cassatt, President of the
Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of its terminal, than John E.
Reeside, the head of the express stage line from New York to
Philadelphia, who beat all previous records in speed and stages.

The newspaper-complex, representing all society, still expressing the
opinion of society, not merely on politics but on all the range of
life, creating, developing, and modifying this opinion, publishes news
which has been standardized by cooperative news-gathering
associations, local, national, and international. In the daily of
today "politics" is but a part and a decreasing part, and a world of
new topics has come into pages which require technical skill, the
well-equipped mind, a wide information, and knowledge of the
condition of the newspaper. The early reporter who once gathered the
city news and turned it in to be put into type and made up by the
foreman,--often also, owner and publisher,--in a sheet as big as a
pocket-handkerchief, is as far removed from the men who share in the
big modern daily, as far as is the modern railroad man from the rough,
tough individual proprietor and driver of the stagecoach, though the
driver of the latter was often a most original character, and a
well-known figure on the highway as railroad men are not.

=Evolution of the profession of journalism=

As this change in the American newspaper came between 1860 and 1880,
the public demand came for the vocational training of the journalist
and experiments in obtaining it began. When Charles A. Dana bought the
New York _Sun_ in 1868, he made up his staff, manag