r is
not merely in proportion to numbers. It grows in a much higher ratio.
The effect is something like that of multiplying the surfaces in a
galvanic battery, or increasing the coils in an electro-magnetic
apparatus. Passion in a multitude becomes a tornado. Eloquence moves a
large audience with a power vastly greater than when the listeners are
few. Similar is that strange influence which fashion exerts in all
societies. Nor is this sympathetic multiplication of power limited to
passion or artistic sentiment: it extends to opinions and all
intellectual phenomena. A person feeling strong emotions or having
profound convictions, and knowing them to be shared by millions of
others, inevitably experiences a strengthening and intensifying
influence from the sympathy of his fellows. If he knew himself to be
solitary and alone in his opinions, unsupported by that human sympathy
which every one craves, his ideas would languish, and be greatly
diminished in their power. It is only great minds, of exceptional
character, which can do battle, single-handed, against the world. Most
men require to be propped and supported on all sides, by the great power
of public opinion. The approach to unanimity of thought promoted by the
general circulation of newspapers, has something of the marvellous
effects seen in other cases, in enhancing the moral and intellectual
power of the community.

The telegraph is the legitimate offspring of the newspaper. In the
absence of the latter, there would have been comparatively little use
for the former. Without the almost universal distribution of the
newspaper, instantaneous communication of news would not have been so
much required, and the invention for that purpose would hardly have been
made. It is probably in the United States alone, with its unlimited
circulation of newspapers, that this extraordinary application of
natural forces could have been conceived. It is here those wonderful
lightning presses have been constructed, under the stimulus of that vast
demand for daily papers which arises from the general education of the
people and their avidity for information. In no other state of things
could such combinations have been imagined, because there would have
been no occasion for the inventive effort, and even the very idea would
not have occurred. Although the wide extent of our country, the vast
distances separating important centres of commerce and industry, and the
general activity and en