midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing the morning intelligence.  Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated, their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight work, toward premature graves, to have the “proof-sheet” of their life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry for “more copy.”

“Nations are to be born in a day.”  Will this great inrush come from personal presence of missionary or philanthropist?  No.  When the time comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations.  As at some telegraphic centre, an operator will send the messages, north and south, and east and west, San Francisco and Heart’s Content catching the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some centre to which shall reach all the electric wires that cross the continent and undergird the sea, some one shall, with the forefinger of the right hand, click the instrument that shall thrill through all lands, across all islands, under all seas, through all palaces, into all dungeons, and startle both hemispheres with the news, that in a few moments shall rush out from the ten thousand times ten thousand printing-presses of the earth:  “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men!”

You see, therefore, that, in the plain words to be written, I have no grudges to gratify against the newspaper press.  Professional men are accustomed to complain of injustice done them, but I take the censure I have sometimes received and place it on one side the scales, and the excessive praise, and place it on the other side, and they balance, and so I consider I have had simple justice.  But we are all aware that there is a class of men in towns and cities who send forth a baleful influence from their editorial pens.  There are enough bad newspapers weekly poured out into the homes of our country to poison a vast population.  In addition to the home manufacture of iniquitous sheets, the mail-bags of other cities come in gorged with abominations.  New York scoops up from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own newspaper filth.  And to-night, lying on the tables of this city, or laid away on the shelf, or in the trunk, for more private perusal, are papers the mere mention of the names of which would send a blush to the cheek, and make the decent and Christian world cry out:  “God save the city!”

There is a paper published in Boston of outrageous character, and yet there are seven thousand copies of that paper coming weekly to New York for circulation.  I will not mention the name, lest some of you should go right away and get it.  It is wonderful how quick the fingers of the printer-boy fly, but the fingers of sin and pollution can set up fifty thousand types in an instant.  The supply of bad newspapers in New York does not meet the insatiable appetite of our people for refuse, and garbage, and moral swill.  We must, therefore, import corrupt weeklies published elsewhere, that make our newspaper stands groan under the burden.