n price, and a still greater fall was
expected to take place. Under these circumstances Messrs. Finlay & Co.
despatched an overland express to India countermanding their orders to
purchase cotton. This was the first, and, I believe, the only overland
express despatched from Glasgow to India by a private party on
commercial purposes."

One of the greatest achievements of our own time, yet too often
overlooked, is the marvellously rapid diffusion of parliamentary news
throughout the country. Important debates are frequently protracted in
the House of Commons into the early hours of the morning. The speeches
are instantly reported by the shorthand writers in the gallery, who dog
the lips of the speakers and commit their every word to paper. Thus
seized in the fleet lines of stenography, the words and phrases are then
transcribed into long-hand. Relays of messengers carry the copy to the
telegraph office, where the words are punched in the form of a
mysterious language on slips of paper like tape, which are run through
the Wheatstone telegraph transmitter, the electric current carrying the
news to distant stations at the rate of several hundred words a minute.
At these stations the receiving-machine pours out at an equal rate,
another tape, bearing a record in a different character, from which
relays of clerks, attending the oracle, convert the weighty sayings
again into ordinary language. The news thus received is carried
forthwith by a succession of messengers to the newspaper office; the
compositors set the matter up in type; it is reviewed and edited by the
men appointed to the duty; the columns are stereotyped, and in that form
are placed in the printing-machines. The machines are set in motion at
astonishing speed, turning out the newspapers cut and folded and ready
for the reader. A staff is in attendance to place under cover the copies
of subscribers for despatch by the early mails. These are carried to the
post-office, and so transmitted to their destinations. Taking Edinburgh
as a point for special consideration, all that has been stated applies
to this city. For the first despatches to the north, the _Scotsman_ and
_Leader_ newspapers are conveyed to certain trains as early as 4 A.M.;
and by the breakfast-hour, or early in the forenoon, the parliamentary
debates of the previous night are being discussed over the greater part
of Scotland. And all this hurry and intellectual activity is going on
while the nation at