or
it is not a _common benefit_ to all: it is but a particular
benefit, that is, a _privilege_. Taxation there forbids the use of
newspapers to the poor. Absence of taxation enables your journals to be
published at one tenth, or even one twentieth, of the English price:
hence several of your daily papers reach from thirty to sixty thousand
readers, while in England one paper alone is on this scale,--the London
'Times,' which circulates thirty thousand, perhaps. Such being the
condition of your press, in addressing you I address a whole people; nor
only so, but a whole intelligent people.

The wide diffusion of intelligence among you is in fact proved by the
immense circulation of your journals. It is not solely the cheap price
which renders your press a common benefit, and not a mere privilege to
the richer; but it is the universality of public instruction. It is
glorious to know that in this flourishing young city alone nearly a
hundred thousand children receive public education annually. Do you
know, gentlemen, what I consider to be your most glorious monument? if
it be, as I have read, that, when your engineers draw geometrical lines
to guide your wandering squatters in the solitudes where virgin Nature
adores her Lord, they place on every thirty-sixth square of the district
marked out to be a township, a modest wooden pole with the glorious
mark, POPULAR EDUCATION. This is your proudest monument. In my opinion,
not your geographical situation, not your material power, not the bold
enterprizing spirit of your people, is the chief guarantee of their
future; but the universality of education: for a whole people, once
become intelligent, never can consent not to be free. You will always be
willing to be free, and you are great and powerful enough to be as good
as your will.

My humble prayers in my country's cause I address to your entire nation:
but you, gentlemen, are the engineers through whom my cause must reach
them. It is therefore highly gratifying to me to see, not isolated men,
but the powerful complex of the great word PRESS, granting me this
important manifestation of generous sentiment. I beg you to consider,
that whatever and wherever I speak, is _always_ spoken to the
press; and for all the imperfections of my language let me plead for
your indulgence, as one of your professional colleagues: for indeed such
I have been.

Yes, gentlemen; I commenced my public career as a journalist. You, under
your happ