Virginia Free Press & Farmers' Repository

NEWSPAPERS.

The following observations are so just, that we cannot forbear inserting them.

"There is hardly any thing so much needed in a family as a newspaper, and yet nothing, comparatively speaking, is esteemed of so little value. If a man undertakes to retrench his expenses, instead of lopping off what is really useless and extravagant, the first to be amputated is the newspaper. He will not drink a bottle of wine less, nor smoke the less tobacco, nor divest himself of a single unseemly habit; but he sits down and demonstrates to a certainty that a paper neither feeds nor clothes him, and therefore it is a great tax. Then a note is despatched to the printer; "Sir, I cannot afford to take your paper any longer; or times are hard, money scarce," ergo you may discontinue sending my paper, or with any excuse that may come uppermost.

Now, we believe that every one who will make a fair trial, and observe the influence of reading over his family, will find at the end of the year that he is not a shilling the poorer for having been a subscriber to a good newspaper. He will have accumulated more real intelligence of the every day concerns of life and the movements of nations—we take it for granted that he has perused every number with avidity—than he would have done in a series of years deprived of the sight thereof. His wife will have picked up much information relative to the government of her children, many useful lessons of household economy, and no small share of instruction suited to her station. The children acquire a habit of reading and a degree of intelligence worth the price of subscription ten times told. In fact, a good well-conducted newspaper in a family, is the best economist of time, and the aptest instructor of the mind."