Mr. Lincoln. Being born and raised so far from the great metropolitan centres, I don’t seem to take to newspapers so kindly as the rest of you do.

Mr. Stanton. With great respect to your Honor (as we say in court), I deem it a great mistake to neglect newspaper suggestions, however provincial.  ’Do you hear (as Hamlet says), let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’  And your metropolitan editor, after all, follows the bent of the public opinion of the provinces as he scissors it from his thousand and one exchanges.  The village or country editor has time to mix among the people, and hears them talk to reproduce it artistically.  The city editor finds little time for this.  Besides, there is very little of reliable public opinion amid cities.  The American mind is styled fickle; so it may be in the great marts.  From them come your sensations and spasms.  The interior is more stable, and less swayed by impulses.  Aggregate a hundred county editorials all over the North, then strike an average, and you will find the product in the last big journal.  The misfortune of Washington social life is that we walk in it over a circle.  Hither come ‘needy knife-grinders,’ and axe-sharpeners, and place-hunters, who say what they think will be agreeable to the ears of power.  But the other kind of mails, presided over by Mr. Blair, bring us wholesome, although sometimes disagreeable, truths.  They are worth attending to, Mr. President.  Let us ‘strike,’ but let us ‘hear.’

Mr. Seward. In the matter of newspapers, my son Fred and I divide reading.  He distils the metropolitan gazettes, and I those of England and France.  Then we exchange commodities at breakfast time.  Fred, having been an editor, can boil down the news very rapidly, and so put its essence into our coffee-pot.  The foreign journals, however, have so much in them that is dissimulative and latent, they require more care and discernment.  Mr. Hunter aids me in dissecting them.

Mr. Lincoln. You are the son of an editor, Montgomery; how do you stand on this subject of Colfax’s bill to carry all the papers in your mails?  The rebel postmaster-general, in his report, made, you remember, an elaborate argument to justify the Jeff Davis law, which forbids the sending of newspapers and periodicals by expressmen.

Mr. Blair. When Colfax will accept as an amendment a prohibition of telegrams, and the obliging our mails to transmit all intelligence, then I will consider of his views.

Mr. Smith. Well said; as good an extract that from the last edition of Blair’s rhetoric as could be wished for.

Mr. Chase. Or in the Tribune satires of Horace!  But let me ask Mr. Blair what he thinks of a newspaper tax.

Mr. Blair. Very favorably.  I am for a mill stamp on every paper, obliging every ten readers to pay the government one cent.