Europe, and knowing personally most of its rulers and statesmen, is E.J.  Dillon of the Daily Telegraph.  And when the quarrels of nations are transferred from the chancelleries to the stricken field there is no one among the war correspondents more enterprising and intrepid in his methods, or more picturesque and vivid with his pen, than M.H.  Donohoe of the Daily Chronicle.  All these men are Irish.  Could there be more striking proof of the natural bent and aptitude of the Irish mind for journalism?

Dean Swift was the mightiest journalist that ever stirred the sluggish soul of humanity.  Were he alive today and had he at his command the enormous circulation of a great daily newspaper, he would keep millions in a perpetual mental ferment, such was the ferocious indignation into which he was aroused by wrong and injustice and his gift of savage ironical expression.  Swift, as a young student in Trinity College, Dublin, saw the birth of the first offspring of the Irish mind in journalism.  The Dublin News Letter made its appearance in June, 1685, and was published every three or four days for the circulation of news and advertisements.  Only one copy of the first issue of this, the earliest of Irish newspapers, is extant.  It is included in the Thorpe collection of tracts in the Royal Dublin Society.  Dated August 26, 1685, it consists of a single leaf of paper printed on both sides, and contains just one item of news, a letter brought by the English packet from London, and two local advertisements.  As I reverently handled it, I was thrilled by the thought that from this insignificant little seed sprang the great national organ, the Freeman’s Journal; the Press of the United Irishmen; the Nation of the Young Irelanders; the United Ireland of the Land League; the Irish World and the Boston Pilot of the American Irish; and the Irish Independent, the first half-penny Dublin morning paper, and the most widely circulated of Irish journals.  If Swift did not write for the Dublin News Letter, he certainly wrote for the Examiner, a weekly miscellany published in the Irish capital from 1710 to 1713, and the first journal that endeavored to create public opinion in Ireland.  It was at Swift’s instigation that this paper was started, and he was doubtless encouraged to suggest it by the success that attended his articles in the contemporary London publication of the same name, the Tory Examiner, in which his journalistic genius was fully revealed.  As it has been expressively put, he wrote his friends, Harley and St. John, into a firm grip of power, and thus, as in other ways, contributed his share to the inauguration and maintenance of that policy which in the last four years of Queen Anne so materially recast the whole European situation.  About the same time there appeared in London the earliest forms of the periodical essay in the Tatler and the Spectator, which exhibit the comprehensiveness of the Irish temperament in writing by affording a contrast between the Irish force and vehemence of Swift and the Irish play of kindly wit and tender pathos in the deft and dainty periods of Richard Steele.