3° 



The National Geographic Magazine 



which this toast affords to pay tribute 

 to the greatest single force in our civili- 

 zation. And I can well understand how 

 those responsible for this program 

 would have regarded it as incomplete 

 without at least a word concerning 

 your most active and potent coadjutor, 

 I had almost said your monitor and 

 guide. You, gentlemen, members of 

 the National Geographic Society, and 

 others like you, are the makers of 

 maps; but the newspapers are the 

 teachers of geography. You made a 

 map long ago of the Dark Continent ; 

 but the gloom that obscured the heart 

 of Africa was not dispelled until an 

 American newspaper man, sent by an 

 American newspaper, penetrated its 

 forbidden fastnesses and let in the 

 light. For three hundred and fifty years 

 your maps have pictured the Philippine 

 Islands; but the world in general never 

 heard of them until the thunder of 

 Dewey's cannon across the startled 

 waters of Manila Bay was echoed in 

 the newspapers of every land. Mem- 

 bers of this learned society have doubt- 

 less known from the beginning of Muk- 

 den and Harbin and Vladivostok and 

 Port Arthur and Sakhalin, but it re- 

 mained for the newspapers to make 

 that knowledge universal. 



You, gentlemen, are the makers of 

 maps. But sometimes your maps are 

 wrong. I will not yet admit that I 

 am old, but I am not so young but I 

 can remember when your maps 

 branded the western two-thirds of 

 Kansas as a part of the great American 

 desert! That section of my state, 

 gentlemen, produced this year 80 mil- 

 lion bushels of wheat, besides corn 

 enough to feed cattle enough to subsist 

 soldiers enough to conquer the earth. 

 My good farmer friend, our distin- 

 guished Secretary of Agriculture, 

 thought that map was right, and in a 

 recent speech he inadvertently used 

 the word arid in connection with that 

 portion of the state and he had to go 



1,500 miles to apologize. It was the 

 newspapers that corrected that map. 

 They were the pioneers. They blazed 

 the way westward, and the people fol- 

 lowed, timidly at first, and then tri- 

 umphantly, making farms where your 

 maps said the desert was, building 

 cities where the National Geographic 

 Society never had the faintest idea that 

 the coyotes and the prairie dogs would 

 ever be disturbed. 



But it is not only in Kansas and in 

 things geographical that the news- 

 papers have blazed the way. All over 

 the civilized world, and in every cause 

 that has engaged human thought and 

 activity and courage they have been the 

 pioneers, the pathfinders. It was in 

 1622 — when the reign of James the 

 First was drawing to a close, when Ben 

 Jonson was poet laureate and the per- 

 sonal friends of William Shakespeare 

 were lamenting his then recent death, 

 when Cromwell was brewing beer at 

 Huntington, when Milton was a youth 

 of sixteen just trying his prentice hand 

 at Latin verse, and Hampden a quiet 

 country gentleman in Buckingham- 

 shire, that the first newspaper addressed 

 to English-speaking people, the Lon- 

 don Weekly News, issued its initial 

 number. A puny sheet it was, of four 

 small pages, printed from rude type, no 

 doubt with intolerable ink, on coarse 

 and dingy paper, and we can well im- 

 agine the quibs and jibes flung at it by 

 the wits among the few who could read 

 it. What prophet or seer among them 

 all could have foretold that with the 

 advent of that petty periodical there 

 was born into the world a force that 

 was to carry light into the dark places 

 of the earth, that was not only to record 

 history, but to make it, that was to pre- 

 scribe penalties and proclaim rewards, 

 that was to take the slave by the hand 

 and make him a man, that was to de- 

 clare war and proclaim peace, that was 

 to make freedom universal and tyranny 

 impossible, that was to make puppets 



