lowlier position.

It is plain that journalism will henceforth and forever be an
important and crowded profession in the United States. The daily
newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities
of modern civilization. The steam-engine is not more essential to us.
The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general
life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole; so that
we can almost say, that those who neither read newspapers nor converse
with people who do read them are not members of the human
_family_;--though, like the negroes of Guinea, they may become such in
time. They are beyond the pale; they have no hold of the electric
chain, and therefore do not receive the shock.

There are two mornings of the year on which newspapers have not
hitherto been published in the city of New York,--the 5th of July, and
the 2d of January. A shadow appears to rest on the world during those
days, as when there is an eclipse of the sun. We are separated from
our brethren, cut off, lost, alone; vague apprehensions of evil creep
over the mind. We feel, in some degree, as husbands feel who, far from
wife and children, say to themselves, shuddering, "What things _may_
have happened, and I not know it!" Nothing quite dispels the gloom
until the Evening Post--how eagerly seized--assures us that nothing
very particular has happened since our last. It is amusing to notice
how universal is the habit of reading a morning paper. Hundreds of
vehicles and vessels convey the business men of New York to that
extremity of Manhattan Island-which may be regarded as the
counting-house of the Western Continent. It is not uncommon for every
individual in a cabin two hundred feet long to be sitting absorbed in
his paper, like boys conning their lessons on their way to school.
Still more striking is it to observe the torrent of workingmen pouring
down town, many of them reading as they go, and most of them provided
with a newspaper for dinner-time, not less as a matter of course than
the tin kettle which contains the material portion of the repast.
Notice, too, the long line of hackney-coaches on a stand, nearly every
driver sitting on his box reading his paper. Many of our Boston
friends have landed in New York at five o'clock in the morning, and
ridden up town in the street cars, filled, at that hour, with women
and boys, folding newspapers and throwing off bundles of them from
time to time, which ar