The press—­those newspapers that are now so strange to us—­like the “Empires,” the “Nations,” the Trusts, and all the other great monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time—­was in the nature of an unanticipated accident.  It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,—­because there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better.  Towards the end this “press” was almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded by a strong aimless energy and happened in a concentrated rush.

Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.

Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—­they were always speeding up the printers—­ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble.  There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy.  Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging,—­engineers, who have never had time to wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste.  The proprietor you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to “hustle,” getting wonderfully in everybody’s way.  At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro.  Sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies.  You imagine all the parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on.  At last the only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating premises are the hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those stresses.  Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south.  The interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.  The paper exists.  Distribution follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles.