MEMORIAL ADDRESSES IN HONOR OF

HARLAN PAGE HALL.

PRESENTED IN A MEETING OF THIS SOCIETY WITH THE MINNESOTA EDITORIAL ASSOCIATION, IN THE SENATE CHAMBER OF THE OLD CAPITOL, ST. PAUL, ON MONDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 14, 1908.

GOVERNOR JOHN A. JOHNSON presided in this meeting, and spoke briefly of his personal acquaintance with Mr. Hall.

CAPTAIN HENRY A. CASTLE, of St. Paul, read the following address:

Minnesota has just celebrated, modestly but impressively, the fiftieth anniversary of her admission to the Union as a state. She has chosen to do this by some expansion of the splendid annual exhibit of her agricultural, manufacturing and mineral industries. More attention might with propriety have been given to exploiting the development of her educational interests, not the least of which is the public press.

The journalism of a commonwealth is at once the inspiration, the record, and to some extent the beneficiary of its advancement. The true-hearted journalists of a new state are the advance agents of prosperity and civilization, too few of whom reap where they have sown.

True civilization and true journalism must be coexistent; as to which may be the major, which the minor premise, let fools. contest. Freedom of the press must be a recognized principle of fundamental, constitutional law, in any real civilization. The free school, the open Bible, the unfettered press, are prime factors of the only progress that reaches and illumines the universal brotherhood of man. None other is genuine. The civilizations

which preceded newspapers were local; their blessings were for the smallest circles. Centuries elapsed before the common people of Europe knew that America had been discovered; ages rolled on while the simplest inventions were slowly breaking their way through crusts of ignorance and prejudice, to the hand and home. of the toiler.

During the fifty years of Minnesota's statehood, her metropolitan journals have advanced from the 4-page, 5-column daily (Mondays excepted), with its intelligence from Europe a month old and its acknowledgments to citizens returning from the East "for New York papers with the freshest of last week's general news." to seven issues a week of papers containing from 16 to 60. pages each, printed from stereotyped plates on perfecting presses, with cablegrams from London, Tokyo, Auckland, and Cape Town, all profusely illustrated, and the latest, choicest morsels of gossip and criticism. The weekly newspapers have increased in value at a corresponding ratio.

Marvel not that with this progress of the press, and largely because of it, Minnesota has increased in population during this half century from 150,000 to 2,000,000; that her magnificent resources have been developed in an equal proportion; that an enormous foreign immigration has been absorbed and Americanized; and that her people are among the most intelligent, progressive and prosperous of the nation's 90,000,000 happy citizens.

That the press had its full share in promoting this progress, as it has had in promoting all modern progress, is universally conceded. The wisest men of the past have been readiest in their ascriptions of honor to this agency. Thomas Jefferson asserted his preference to have newspapers without a government, rather than a government without newspapers. Thiers averred that national liberty and the freedom of the press cannot exist separately. Lord Mansfield boasted that the courts of justice sit every day in the newspapers. Bulwer called them sleepless watchmen that report every danger which menaces the institutions of the country. Macaulay plaintively pronounced it the crowning misfortune of the English laborers in the days of the Stuarts that no newspapers pleaded their cause. De Tocqueville said that the newspaper is the intellectual familiar to all men, dropping the same

thought into ten thousand minds at the same moment. Wendell Phillips calls it parent, school, college, theater, all in one; and says every drop of our blood is colored by it.

Minnesota, as a territory and as a state, early acquired a highly creditable reputation in Eastern political and financial centers for the quality of the men she sent to represent her. The polished and scholarly Ramsey, the Rices, Sibley, Wilkinson, Windom, and Donnelly, were in such marked contrast to the shirtsleeve senators and sod-corn representatives usually chosen in the beginning by Western constituencies, that a standard of presumably refined and cultivated citizenship behind them was established, which has been of inestimable benefit to their successors.

Contemporary with these broad, cultured and honored statebuilders of the early days, was a galaxy of able editors, remarkable for the energy and success with which they spread abroad the glories of glorious Minnesota, while at the same time battling, according to their several lights, for good laws, honest government, and a square deal for all.

Their lines went out through all the earth; there was no speech nor language where their voice was not heard. Antiseptic thought and sterilized expression were not always available, but their real meaning was seldom misapprehended.

To mention the names of James M. Goodhue, Joseph R. Brown, Earle S. Goodrich, Thomas Foster, T. M. Newson, William R. Marshall, Joseph A. Wheelock, Daniel Sinclair, Frederick Driscoll, William S. King, D. S. B. Johnston, J. A. Leonard, W. B. Mitchell, and L. E. Fisher, is to catalogue only a few of those who, with varying measures of ability and diverse standards of social and political ethics, rallied loyally around the state flag and worked strenuously in building up the moral, material, and educational interests of Minnesota.

No new state ever had better public men, better journalists, or better citizens. Let our fervent prayer be that their successors, with presumably better equipment and enlarged opportunities, may worthily carry on their noble work.

Academic discussion as to the real influence of the press on government and civilization is always fascinating. Whether journalism is a sound or only the echo of a sound, whether the news: