Illinois newspaper directory. History of the Illinois press association

Illinois Newspaper Directory and Historyup to the very moment of the present—that past which the grammarians call, not thepast perfect or the pluperfect, but the imperfect which goes on living, loving, strivingup to the moment of the present and then the next moment seizes the present andgoes imperfectly on toward a future which the present prevents the past from everattaining— gets no nearer to future than the 'first periphrastic,'—the name given inthe Greek grammar which I used as a boy in Illinois to the mood which was always'about to' do or be something."And why may not those who daily endeavor with conscientiousness and infinitepains to record and interpret history at the moment of its making (where the presentbecomes the past) be accorded a place among historians? As it is, there is a dispositionto speak of them rather comtemptously as 'journalists,' those who have to do withthe things of a day, whose words, for the most part anonymous, live but from editionto edition or at most for only a few hours, like the ephemerids which Benjamin Franklin,the patron saint of printers and journalists, described in a letter recently rediscovered inParis and cabled in full to America to occupy the first column on the front page of aNew York daily."As one who, once included in the class 'educator,' has recently become a memberof that group of chroniclers and augurs of the day, observing the flight of events inall the skies of the earth; and who seems to some to have fallen, like Lucifer, from ahigh estate into one which has no higher place than the fourth, I venture to say aword on behalf of my fellow journalistic historians, those luciferous writers scatteredover the earth from darkest Africa to luminous Chicago, from Greenland's icy mountainsto Mother India's coral islands. They are like the crustacean creatures to whom thescientist has given the name Luciferin (and so redeemed the name Lucifer from itsMiltonian doom) which though it seems a bit of fallen star dust gives the utmost lightwithout heat—a name that will some day be appropriate for the entire press as anagency of light without heat which only the lucifugous, those who love darkness ratherthan light, will shun."Balzac has called journalism 'the religion of democracy' and the journalists thepriests of democracy. (I do not know just what he meant—except that democracydaily turns to the newspaper as an instrument essential to its highest functioning.) Ifjournalists are priests, they are priests after the order of Melchisedek, that is, having'neither beginning of days nor end of life,' for they live in the eternal Einsteinianpresent, ever on the outer verge of the 'Continuum.' To quote a translator of Einstein,'the continuum of events exists as a background for phenomena and when happeningsoccur in any region whatsoever the events are there ready to give forth their testimony.'But unless the journalist is there to hear what the events have to say, it will be buriedso deep by the succeeding events that even the historian of the past is liable never tofind it except with great labor if at all. The true function of the historian was definedtwo thousand years ago by Polybius who said that it is 'to record with fidelity whatwas virtually said or done no matter how commonplace it may be.' That is the definitionof the function of the true journalist, with a change of tense only, and with theadded responsibility of giving it its setting or relationship and to do that he goes towhat is called in the newspaper office the 'morgue' for his material, (the clippingsfrom the newspapers of yesterday,) which becomes the history of the past."And as history is no longer a story of doings only of kings and statesmen andprelates and generals, but considers merchants and artisans, farmers and explorers, studentsand vagabonds, so is journalism, the religion of democracy, all-embracing—it isthe continuing revelation (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly) and record of theAlmighty's continuing revision of the earth (which is not complete, as the earthquakes310