sibility of journalism may be appreciated when it is remembered
that the newspaper to-day is the greatest educator of the people who are
to maintain our free institutions. Widely as our schools have extended
until they are accessible to the humblest of the land, the newspaper as
an educator reaches vastly more people than all the colleges and schools
of the nation. It is read not only by the men and women of mature years,
but it begins its offices as teacher in the home circle as soon as the
child becomes a pupil in the school, and it is constantly although
imperceptibly moulding the minds of millions of our youths of all
classes and all conditions, and it has no vacations in its great work.
It not only aids the more intelligent to a sound exercise of judgment on
questions of public interest, but it is ever quickening the impulses and
shaping the aims of those who are most easily impressed, and during the
important period of life when the character of men and women is formed.

I have long held that the responsible direction of a widely read and
respected daily newspaper is the highest trust in our free government. I
do not thus speak of it to claim for it honors which may be questioned,
but I speak of it to present the oppressive responsibilities which rest
upon those who are to-day educating a nation of 70,000,000 of people,
under a government where every citizen is a sovereign, and where the
people hold in their own hands the destiny of the greatest Republic of
the world. Presidents, Cabinets, Senators, and Representatives come and
play their parts on the public stage and pass away--the few to be
remembered, the many to be forgotten--and political parties are created
and perish as new necessities and new conditions arise in the progress
of our free institutions. In my own day there have been created four new
political organizations which attained national importance, all of which
have elected Governors in Pennsylvania, and two of which have elected
Presidents of the United States, but three of them exist to-day only in
history. They are the Anti-Masonic, the Whig, the American, and the
Republican parties. Thus while rulers and the parties which call them to
power, come and go in the swift mutations of American politics, the
newspaper survives them all, and continues in its great career
regardless of the success or defeat of men or political organizations.

To seek promotion in civil trust from the editorial chair of an