every establishment and the tiniest little shops; and that, whether
regarded as master or as man, their profits are very modest and
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
their risks numerous, while their trouble and responsibility are
very great.
The newsvendors and newsmen are a very subordinate part of that
wonderful engine – the newspaper press. Still I think we all know
very well that they are to the fountain-head what a good service of
water pipes is to a good water supply. Just as a goodly store of
water at Watford would be a tantalization to thirsty London if it
were not brought into town for its use, so any amount of news
accumulated at Printing-house Square, or Fleet Street, or the
Strand, would be if there were no skill and enterprise engaged in
its dissemination.
We are all of us in the habit of saying in our every-day life, that
“We never know the value of anything until we lose it.” Let us try
the newsvendors by the test. A few years ago we discovered one
morning that there was a strike among the cab-drivers. Now, let us
imagine a strike of newsmen. Imagine the trains waiting in vain
for the newspapers. Imagine all sorts and conditions of men dying
to know the shipping news, the commercial news, the foreign news,
the legal news, the criminal news, the dramatic news. Imagine the
paralysis on all the provincial exchanges; the silence and
desertion of all the newsmen’s exchanges in London. Imagine the
circulation of the blood of the nation and of the country standing
still, – the clock of the world. Why, even Mr. Reuter, the great
Reuter – whom I am always glad to imagine slumbering at night by
the side of Mrs. Reuter, with a galvanic battery under his bolster,
bell and wires to the head of his bed, and bells at each ear –
think how even he would click and flash those wondrous dispatches
of his, and how they would become mere nothing without the activity
and honesty which catch up the threads and stitches of the electric
needle, and scatter them over the land.
It is curious to consider – and the thought occurred to me this
day, when I was out for a stroll pondering over the duties of this
evening, which even then were looming in the distance, but not
quite so far off as I could wish – I found it very curious to
consider that though the newsman must be allowed to be a very
unpicturesque rendering of Mercury, or Fame, or what-not
conventional messenger from the clouds, and although we must allow
that he is of this earth, and has a good deal of it on his boots,
still that he has two very remarkable characteristics, to which
none of his celestial predecessors can lay the slightest claim.
One is that he is always the messenger of civilization; the other
that he is at least equally so – not only in what he brings, but in
what he ceases to bring. Thus the time was, and not so many years
ago either, when the newsman constantly brought home to our doors –
though I am afraid not to our hearts, which were custom-hardened –
the most terrific accounts of murders, of our fellow-creatures
being publicly put to death for what we now call trivial offences,
in the very heart of London, regularly every Monday morning. At
the same time the newsman regularly brought to us the infliction of
other punishments, which were demoralising to the innocent part of
the community, while they did not operate as punishments in
deterring offenders from the perpetration of crimes. In those same
days, also, the newsman brought to us daily accounts of a regularly
accepted and received system of loading the unfortunate insane with
chains, littering them down on straw, starving them on bread and
water, damaging their clothes, and making periodical exhibitions of
them at a small charge; and that on a Sunday one of our public
resorts was a kind of demoniacal zoological gardens. They brought
us accounts at the same time of some damage done to the machinery