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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 4
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A former member of the Pall Mall Gazette's staff has just returned to London from the United States, after some seven months spent in studying American journalism by the practical process of earning his daily bread as a working journalist. He has come back impressed with three great ideas—first, that the profession of journalist is harder in New York than in London; secondly, that the growth of trusts establishing a monopoly of articles of necessity is the portentous peril that threatens American development; and thirdly, that the Pope has far more power in the States than in any Papal country in the Old World. The papers are afraid to print a word to which the priests take exception. As for the development of trusts, he reports that the chief capitalist of the Standard Oil Trust has accumulated a fortune of £32,000,000, and that the growth of the colossal monopolies is giving an extraordinary impetus to the formation of associations, whose gospel is Edward Bellamy's « Looking Backward. » That book—the Socialist's vision of the new heaven and the new earth—is still in great vogue all over the Union, and may yet produce notable results.
Mistakes are to be expected in a book like Dilke's « Problems of Greater Britain » —the wonder is that there are not more of them. The Wellington Press says:— « Turning to New Zealand we are amazed to learn on the authority of Sir Harry Atkinson that the New Zealand paper-manufacturers who were unable to hold their own without Protection have after a short period of Protection become able to manufacture paper enough for the islands and to sell at the same rate at what paper can be brought from Australia or from Europe! A general statement of this kind is excessively misleading. The paper-mills in the colony produce nothing but wrapping-papers, and the paper-bag manufactories make these wrappers up. We have no means of ascertaining the number of mills or the number of hands employed, as the publication of theitable in the Blue Books is discontinued since 1886. But probably the home manufacture of paper bags is about £8,000 value against £7,000 imported, and the manufactured wrapping about a value of £7,000 home manufacture against £6,000 imported. The whole imports of paper of all kinds amounted to a value of £94,000 in 1888, and show a large increase in quantity with a considerable diminution in price in the largest line from the year 1881. »