New Hampshire Statesman And State Journal

NEWSPAPERS,

An excellent Oration was delivered on the 4th of July last by Joseph R. Ingersoll, Esq of Philadelphia, from which we extract the following just estimate of the value of the newspaper press:

"Shall we compare the advancement of the Canadas, much favored as they have been by their distant rulers, with that of their republican neighbors? A single illustration may suffice. The happiest invention of modern times for the diffusion of useful and universal information, in the cheapest form, the freshest in production, the most various in matter, and the most practical for the purposes of life, is the establishment of gazettes. The art of printing was imperfect without them. Books are the preceptors of the scholar and the philosopher, but the daily press is the friend and the companion of the man. No station is so exalted as to be out of the sphere of its influence, none so humble that it does not reach it. It is alike welcome in the populous city and the sequestered vale. It goes forth with the sun himself, and diffuses universal light. Political knowledge and individual instruction are alike disseminated by it. It penetrates the workshop and the counting room, the cottage and the cabin: It flies to the traveller, however remote, on wings as swift almost as light, and overtakes and cheers him with the intelligence of his home. The chamber of the sick is relieved by its consolations; even the dungeon of the prisoner is rendered less dark by its sympathy. We are told by Sir James Mackintosh, in his celebrated defence of Peltier for an alleged libel on Napoleon, that in the year of the Armada, Queen Elizabeth caused to be printed the first gazette that ever appeared in England. This,' he adds, 'was one of the most sagacious experiments, one of the greatest discoveries of political genius, one of the most striking anticipations of future experience that we find in history. More than sixty gazettes are daily issued from the presses of these United States, besides the numbers which less frequently appear. In England, too, they multiplied and magnified to the best of purposes under the patronage of the successors of Elizabeth, their ministers and people. Yet the Canadas have, it seems, within the last few weeks, (if it has been done at all) made their very first attempt thus with every rising sun to enlighten the public mind—to penetrate like his beams the deepest caverns and dispel the shades of ignorance—to establish a watchtower, which to a people boasting of freedom and meaning to maintain it, is indispensable—a lighthouse which to a people desirous of general knowledge, is inestimable."