The number of daily papers was returned at 350, but it has greatly increased, and must now exceed four hundred.  Chicago, which then was a small town, rejoices now in no less than 24 periodicals, seven of which are daily, and five of them of the largest size.  At St. Louis, which but a few years since was on the extreme borders of civilization, we find several, and one of these has grown from a little sheet of 8 by 12 inches to the largest size, yielding to its proprietors $50,000 per annum, while Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham are still compelled to depend upon their tri-weekly sheets.  St. Louis itself furnishes the type, and Louisville furnishes the paper.  Everywhere, the increase in size is greater than that in the number of newspapers, and the increase of ability in both the city and country press, greater than in either number or size.  These things are necessary consequences of that decentralization which builds school-houses and provides teachers, where centralization raises armies and provides generals.  The schools enable young men to read, think, and write, and the local newspaper is always at hand in which to publish.  Beginning thus with the daily or weekly journal, the youth of talent makes his way gradually to the monthly or quarterly magazine, and ultimately to the independent book.

Examine where we may through the newspaper press, there is seen the activity which always accompanies the knowledge that men can rise in the world if they will; but this is particularly obvious in the daily press of cities, whose efforts to obtain information, and whose exertions to lay it before the public, are without a parallel.  Centralization, like that of the London “Times,” furnishes its readers with brief paragraphs of telegraphic news, where decentralization gives columns.  The New York “Tribune” furnishes, for two cents, better papers than are given in London for ten, and it scatters them over the country by hundreds of thousands.  Decentralization is educating the whole mind of the country, and it is to this it is due that the American farmer is furnished with machines which are, according to the London “Times,” “about twice as light in draught as the lightest of English machines of the same description, doing as much, if not more work than the best of them, and with much less power; dressing the grain, which they do not, and which can be profitably disposed of at one half, or at least one third less money than its British rivals”—­and is thus enabled to purchase books.  Centralization, on the other hand, furnishes the English farmer, according to the same authority, “with machines strong and dear enough to rob him of all future improvements, and tremendously heavy, either to work or to draw;” and thus deprives him of all power to educate his children, or to purchase for himself either books or newspapers.