It is plain that journalism will henceforth and forever be an important and crowded profession in the United States.  The daily newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization.  The steam-engine is not more essential to us.  The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole; so that we can almost say, that those who neither read newspapers nor converse with people who do read them are not members of the human family;—­though, like the negroes of Guinea, they may become such in time.  They are beyond the pale; they have no hold of the electric chain, and therefore do not receive the shock.

There are two mornings of the year on which newspapers have not hitherto been published in the city of New York,—­the 5th of July, and the 2d of January.  A shadow appears to rest on the world during those days, as when there is an eclipse of the sun.  We are separated from our brethren, cut off, lost, alone; vague apprehensions of evil creep over the mind.  We feel, in some degree, as husbands feel who, far from wife and children, say to themselves, shuddering, “What things may have happened, and I not know it!” Nothing quite dispels the gloom until the Evening Post—­how eagerly seized—­assures us that nothing very particular has happened since our last.  It is amusing to notice how universal is the habit of reading a morning paper.  Hundreds of vehicles and vessels convey the business men of New York to that extremity of Manhattan Island-which may be regarded as the counting-house of the Western Continent.  It is not uncommon for every individual in a cabin two hundred feet long to be sitting absorbed in his paper, like boys conning their lessons on their way to school.  Still more striking is it to observe the torrent of workingmen pouring down town, many of them reading as they go, and most of them provided with a newspaper for dinner-time, not less as a matter of course than the tin kettle which contains the material portion of the repast.  Notice, too, the long line of hackney-coaches on a stand, nearly every driver sitting on his box reading his paper.  Many of our Boston friends have landed in New York at five o’clock in the morning, and ridden up town in the street cars, filled, at that hour, with women and boys, folding newspapers and throwing off bundles of them from time to time, which are caught by other boys and women in waiting.  Carriers are flitting in every direction, and the town is alive with the great business of getting two hundred thousand papers distributed before breakfast.