Chapter I: The Birth of Stentor

It is some eight thousand years ago that Man, having already set himself apart from the brute creation by walking on two legs and creating the art of speech, paved the way to the “best seller” by the invention of writing.

The nomad settled in the village. From the village there grew the city. Empires rose, fell, and crumbled into decay. Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, da Vinci, Shakespeare enlarged the boundaries of intellect and of emotion. America was rediscovered. Moveable types were introduced to Europe. And the newspaper, via the printed book and the pamphlet, sprang from the loins of Gutenberg. Grub Street gave place to Fleet Street, and the Carmelites to Carmelite House. Compulsory schooling for the masses produced a new social phenomenon in the shape of whole nations among whom the illiterate was the exception, and Demos roared voraciously for newsprint. And the halfpenny “daily” created a demand for the forest products of Newfoundland.

So may our grandchildren condense their Outline of History.

Historically considered, the Newspaper is an upstart, although its germs existed in the Roman Empire in the shape of _Acta Diurna_ and _Acta Publica_, Government publications which contained registers of births and deaths, and particulars of the corn supply and of payments into the Treasury. The _Acta_ even embodied so modern a feature as the Court Circular.

Journalism found no incitement during the Dark and Middle Ages, and the use of moveable types at first stimulated the production of books rather than that of periodicals. By the latter half of the fifteenth century, rudimentary journals were, however, making their more or less regular appearance in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and embedded in Continental archives is to be found at least one copy of a contemporary account of Columbus’ voyages to America recorded while his journeyings still represented the latest news.

The sixteenth century saw the _Gazzetta_, an Italian production in manuscript, to be read on payment of a _gazzetta_, a small coin of the period, which eventually gave its name as a synonym for newspapers and other publications. None of these Continental attempts to assuage the thirst for news seems, however, to have embodied the seeds of permanence, and the idea of a Newspaper in the modern sense, that is, of a publication issued at regular intervals and characterised by continuity in administration and policy, is largely English. The first regular English newspaper was the _Weekly News from Italy, Germany, etc._, founded in 1622, and nineteen years later an English paper secured a “scoop” by publishing a report of a Parliamentary debate for the first time on record. In 1709, London had its first daily under the title of the _Daily Courant_; the _Morning Post_ dates back to 1772; and the _Times_, originally established as the _Daily Universal Register_, followed in 1785.

It is almost impossible to assign a definite historical date for the inception of the newspaper as a regular institution created to satisfy a public demand, since so many of the journalistic pioneers were both of a fugitive and ephemeral nature, whilst others were pamphlets rather than news bulletins. But if we strike a mean between the _Daily Courant_ and the _Morning Post_, we may say that the newspaper has enjoyed some two centuries of vigorous life. It has thus witnessed the birth of the Industrial Age and of its offspring, Mechanical Transport, has seen the formation of the United States of America, the peopling of Canada and Australia, the fall of most European thrones, the development of great communities in South America, the birth of flying, and the shifting of the centre of gravity of political power from the semi-instructed few to the uninstructed many. If Stentor has lost his head a trifle at the contemplation of such an unparalleled record of human activity, and of a period pregnant with such almost unimaginable possibilities for good and evil, who shall wonder?