The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new editor's chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names. If their signatures were suppressed, the authorship, as it was intended it should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.
What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, the _Echo_, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of John Passmore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up like mushrooms after rain. _Evening News_ or _Star_ at night, the _Morning_, the _Leader_ are only a few of the fresh notes added to the music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not proclaim the printed wares of a millionaire _in esse_ or _in posse_. Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press of the country has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special representatives of their journal stationed abroad.
Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C. Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed three-line paragraph has come in. The _Daily Mail_ has shown a busy generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a buffet, that the essence of the day's news of the world can be read in a few odd minutes as easily as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were once packed into a nutshell.[96]