Illinois newspaper directory. History of the Illinois press association

Illinois Newspaper Directory and HistoryWhen I contemplate the ravageOf my alphabetic lore,See the neolithic savageWaging culture-loving war,Using logarithmic tablesTo direct his hellish fire,Preaching philosophic fablesTo excuse his mad desire;See pure science turned to choking,Shooting, drowning, human kind;Hear a litany invokingHate in God's benignant mind;See the forest trees transmutedInto lettered pulp, while manWith a brain, deep-convoluted,Takes the place of primal Pan,And instead of finding pleasureIn a simple life, with song,Spends his planetary leisureReading how the world's gone wrong;-—Seeing, hearing this, I've wondered'Mid this murder, greed and fret,Whether I have sinned or blunderedGiving man the alphabet."But when I was in Greece after the War, I showed him copies of the Americandaily papers and he made this statement, as accurately as I can translate it:From beyond the farthest Thule,Past the flying isles of night,There have come, imprinted newlyFrom great cylinders of light;My old letters' new descendentsSpelling out a planet's dreamWith a western independenceAll the evil man's inventedWith my letters, I forget,And now I am quite contentedThat I saved the alphabet."The best answer to those who find fault with our product in the present tenseis given by a recent historian of the newspapers, the late Professor Lucy Salmon, ofVassar College, who has said:" 'With all its inaccuracies, its lack of proportion, its many temptations—not alwaysresisted—to throw prismatic colors instead of the white light of truth on its accountsof the day, the periodical press still remains the most important single source that thethree centuries.'historian has at his command for the reconstruction of the life of the lastAnd if for the last three centuries, why not for the passing day?"Mr. Justice Holmes once said in a letter to a friend of mine that we no longerlook to the past for our sanctions. 'A fashion in hats goes around the earth in sixmonths and is forgotten in a year.' 'We shall come to glory,' he added, 'not in immortality,but in illocality.' The press is the chief agency of illocality, assisted by those314