We know that the Press has its faults and its weaknesses.  We can see them every day, in our miserable contemporaries, and we do not shirk the painful duty of pointing them out.  We know that it has also virtues, manifold, and we do not deny them, when an appreciative audience compliments us upon them.  A conscientious journalist never shrinks from the truth, even when it does violence to his modesty.  In fact, he tells the truth under all circumstances, or nearly all.  If driven to the painful alternative of choosing between that which is new and that which is true, he wisely decides that “truth” is mighty, and will prevail, whereas news won’t keep.  Nevertheless, it is a safe rule not to believe everything that you see in the papers.  Advertisers are human, and liable to err.

Lamartine predicted, long ago, that before the end of the present century the Press would be the whole literature of the world.  His prediction is almost verified already.  The multiplication and the magnitude of newspapers present, not a literary, but an economic problem.  The Sunday paper alone has grown, within a decade, from a modest quarto to a volume of 48, 60, 96, 120 pages, with the stream steadily rising and threatening the levees on both banks.  At a similar rate of expansion in the next ten years, it will be made up of not less than 1,000 pages, and the man who undertakes to read it will be liable to miss First Mass.

The thoughtful provision of giving away a “farm coupon” with every number may avert trouble for a time, but it will be only for a time.  The reader will need a farm, on which to spread out and peruse his purchase; but the world is small, and land has not the self-inflating quality of paper.

But to speak more seriously:  Is modern journalism, then, nothing but a reflection of the frivolity of the day, of the passing love of notoriety?  I say no!  I believe that the day of sensational journalism, of the blanket sheet and the fearful woodcut, is already passing away.  Quantity cannot forever overcome quality, in that or any other field.  When we think of the men who have done honor to the newspaper profession, we do not think so proudly of this or that one who “scooped” his contemporaries with the first, or “exclusive,” report of a murder or a hanging, but of men like the late George W. Childs, whom all true journalists honor and lament.

We think of the heroes of the pen, who carried their lives in their hands as they went into strange, savage countries, pioneers of civilization.  It would be invidious to mention names, where the roll is so long and glorious; but I think, at the moment, of O’Donovan, Forbes, Stanley, Burnaby, Collins, and our own Irish-American, MacGahan, the great-hearted correspondent, who changed the political map of Eastern Europe by exposing the Bulgarian atrocities.  The instinct which impelled those men was the same which impelled Columbus.

I think, in another field, of the noblest man I have ever known, the truest, most chivalrous gentleman, a newspaper man, an editor—­I am proud to say, an Irish-American editor—­the memory of whose honored name, I well know, is the only excuse for my being here to-night—­John Boyle O’Reilly!  You have honored his name more than once here to-night, and in honoring him you honor the profession which he so adorned.