ed down in this quiet community to devote
my life to journalism, a shrill, weird voice was heard in the beautiful
valley of the Juniata as the iron horse made his first visit to us with
his train of cars. It was welcome music as it echoed over the foothills
of the Alleghenies, and entirely new to nearly all who heard it. With
the railway came the telegraph, the express, and the advent of the
daily newspaper among the people. In a single year the community was
transformed from its sedate and quiet ways into more energetic,
progressive, and speculative life. It was a new civilization that had
come to disturb the dreams of nearly a century, and it rapidly extended
its new influences until it reached the remotest ends of the little
county, and with this beneficent progress of civilization came also the
vices which ever accompany it, but against which the civilization itself
is ever fortified by the new factors called into requisition to
strengthen its restraining power. While advancing the better attributes
of mankind it has left unrest in the shop, the field, the forest, and
the mine, where there was content in other days, but that unrest is the
inevitable attendant of our matchless strides in the most enlightened
civilization of the age, and it will ever present new problems for our
statesmanship.

It should be remembered that while Philadelphia had then two journals of
national fame under the direction of such accomplished editorial writers
as Joseph R. Chandler and Morton McMichael, there was not a daily
newspaper in this city, or in the State, that had a circulation of
5,000, excepting only the "Ledger," then a penny journal almost unknown
outside of the city. Even the New York "Tribune" and the New York
"Herald" then relatively quite as distinguished as national journals as
they are to-day, did not have a daily circulation of over 15,000. There
are several daily journals now published in Philadelphia, each of which
circulates more newspapers every day than did all the great dailies of
New York and Pennsylvania combined, fifty years ago. There were then
successful penny papers in New York and Pittsburg as well as
Philadelphia, but the penny journal of that day was only a local
newspaper in its way, and was unfelt as a political factor.

Contrast the business, political, moral, and social conditions which
confront the journalism of this great city to-day, and none can fail to
appreciate the greatly magnified duties and