are expected to listen to this spoken newspaper, and no one can fall back, if he transgresses one of the published decrees, on the assertion that he was not present when The Town Crier announced the official decree.

The Town Crier of Champery has its spoken advertising department. Its publisher gives notice, by spoken word, of the public auctions of household goods, cattle, etc., as announced by the Office of Law and Bankruptcy. The Town Crier gives the news of mercantile houses, with the prices of the goods they are offering. It gives notice of lost and found articles and quotes the price paid by local establishments for farm products. In other words, it takes the place of a local printed newspaper, which, up to the present time, has never existed in Champery.

BIRTH OF ENGLISH JOURNALISM

In some respects the evolution of journalism in London was the same as that found in Rome. Men of wealth lived only four or five months in London and spent the rest of the year in the country. While away from the city, they wanted to know the doings of the court and the gossip of the coffee-houses. To keep themselves informed, they hired professional letter-writers who gathered the items and then forwarded the most important by special post. One of the best and hence busiest writers of such letters was one Thomas Archer. So excellent was his service that demand for his letters became larger than he could supply by his pen. To meet this demand he called the printing-press to his aid, and instead of posting items on irregular days of the week, he put them all in one letter, printed it, and mailed it by a certain post. Nathaniel Butter was the first regular publisher of this printed news-letter, The Weekly Newes, and posterity has called him rather than Archer the founder of the English newspaper press. There had been an occasional printed news-sheet or news-book before the appearance of The Weekly Newes, but to Nathaniel Butter belongs the honor of "printing all the news of the day upon a single sheet and publishing it regularly week by week upon fixed days and of giving it a distinctive title at a time when there was nothing that could with strictness be called a newspaper." Papers with dates prior to 1622, when The Weekly

Newes first appeared, have come to light from time to time, but they have all proved to be forgeries.

CONDITIONS IN CHINA

In the case of China, however, the change from the written to the printed sheet was abrupt. Chinese publishers wasted no time by printing from movable type, but jumped at once from the hand-written production to the impression from a wooden block. The news was written on a transparent sheet, pasted face downward on a wooden block, and then, save where the Chinese characters showed, the wood was chiseled away. The block was then inked, pressed upon a sheet of white paper, and lo, a printed newspaper!

By way of conclusion, it may be noted that the English term "newspaper" was first used, according to the best information obtainable, in the year 1670, when it appeared in a letter addressed to Charles Perrot, the second editor of The Oxford Gazette. The expression was found in the request, "I wanted your newes paper Monday last post."

CHAPTER II

PRECURSORS OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS

AMONG the broadsides published in New England during the early colonial days, to correct false reports, may be found certain printed sheets so closely resembling a newspaper that such a term has been applied to them. While they did give some domestic news of the colonies and while they were printed to sell as news sheets, they had no regularity in publication, being issued only once. Consequently, they are to be regarded as the precursors of the newspaper press and not as real newspapers.

GREEN'S BROADSIDE

One of the earliest of these broadsides in some ways the most important was The Present State of the New-English Affairs (1689). It was a single sheet, 8 x 14 inches, printed on only one side. Its printer and publisher was Samuel Green. The first part consisted of an extract from a letter of the Reverend Increase Mather, dated at Deal in Kent, to Simon Baldwin, Governor of the Massachusetts colony in New England. The most important item in the sheet was a "passage extracted from the publick News-Letter" (of London) for July 6, 1689. Because the extract has historical value and at the same time shows, to a certain extent, the kind of news found in The London News-Letter, it is worth quotation:

The people of New England having made a thorow Revolution, and secured the publick Criminals. On Thursday last, the Reverend and Learned Mr. Mather, President of the Colledge, and Minister of Boston, waited on the King; and in a most Excellent Speech laid before His Majesty, the State of that People; saying, That they were sober, and Industrious, and fit for Martial Service; and all with their Lives and Interests were at His Majesties Command, to tender the same unto His Majesty: That they desired nothing but His Majesties Acceptance of what they had done, and His Protection; and that if His Majesty pleased to encourage and Commission them, He might easily be Em