We believe, however, that if the local press were annihilated, and this whole nation lived dependent upon the press of a single city, still we should be safe from a paper despotism; because the power of the editorial lessens as the intelligence of the people in-creases.  The prestige of the editorial is gone.  Just as there is a party in England who propose the omission of the sermon from the church service as something no longer needed by the people, so there are journalists who think the time is at hand for the abolition of editorials, and the concentration of the whole force of journalism upon presenting to the public the history and picture of the day.  The time for this has not come, and may never come; but our journalists already know that editorials neither make nor mar a daily paper, that they do not much influence the public mind, nor change many votes, and that the power and success of a newspaper depend finally upon its success in getting and its skill in exhibiting the news.  The word newspaper is the exact and complete description of the thing which the true journalist aims to produce.  The news is his work; editorials are his play.  The news is the point of rivalry; it is that for which nineteen twentieths of the people buy newspapers; it is that which constitutes the power and value of the daily press; it is that which determines the rank of every newspaper in every free country.

No editor, therefore, will ever reign over the United States, and the newspapers of no one city will attain universal currency.  Hence the importance of journalism in the United States.  By the time a town has ten thousand inhabitants, it usually has a daily paper, and in most large cities there is a daily paper for every twenty thousand people.  In many of the Western cities there are daily newspapers conducted with great energy, and on a scale of expenditure which enables them to approximate real excellence.  Many of our readers will live to see the day when there will be in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and San Francisco daily newspapers more complete, better executed, and produced at greater expense than any newspaper now existing in the United States.  This is a great deal to say, in view of the fact, that, during the late war, one of the New York papers expended in war correspondence alone two thousand dollars a week.  Nevertheless, we believe it.  There will never be two newspapers in any one city that can sustain such an expenditure, but in fifteen years from, to-day there will be one, we think, in each of our great cities, and besides that one there will be four or five struggling to supplant it, as well as one or two having humbler aims and content with a lowlier position.