nt being at an end, they were set free. Such
was the issue of the last battle between the Parliament and the press,
on the question of publishing the debates. It was fought in 1771, and
had been a tougher conflict than any of its predecessors, but it was
decisive. There is no danger of the subject being reopened; the
reporting of the debates is now one of the most important of the
functions of our newspapers; and the members themselves are too sensible
of the services rendered them by the reporters' gallery to be suicidal
enough to inaugurate a new crusade against it. What those services are,
any one who has been patriotic or curious enough to sit out a debate in
the strangers' gallery over night, and then to read the speeches, to
which he has listened, in the newspapers next morning, can readily
appreciate. Hazy ideas have become clear, mutilated and unintelligible
sentences have been neatly and properly arranged, needless repetitions
and tautological verbiage have disappeared; there is no sign of
hesitation; hums and haws, and other inexpressible ejaculations, grunts,
and interpolations find no place; the thread of an argument is shown
where none was visible before, and all is fluent, concise, and more or
less to the point.

Meanwhile the tone of the press had again greatly improved, partly owing
to purification through the trials which it had undergone, and partly
owing to the better taste of the public. Its circulation had rapidly
increased. In 1753 the number of stamps on newspapers in the United
Kingdom was 7,411,757; in 1760, 9,464,790; in 1774, 12,300,608; in 1775,
12,680,906; and in 1776, 12,836,000, a halt in its progress being caused
by Lord North's new stamp act, raising the stamp from one to one and a
half pence. The ordinary price of a news sheet was two or two and a half
pence, but this was more than doubled by its cost of transmission
through the post office, which, for a daily paper, was L5 a year. The
_Morning Post_, the full title of which was originally the _Morning Post
and Daily Advertiser_, first came out in 1772. In 1775 it appeared
regularly every morning, under the editorship of the Rev. Henry Bate,
afterward the Rev. Sir Henry Bate Dudley, Bart. The _Gentleman's
Magazine_--that prolific mine to whose stores of wealth the present
series of articles is beholden times out of number--gives a curious
account of a duel into which this clerical editor was forced in his
clerical capacity. Editorial du