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Show On October 3, 1861, Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, who had given the Republican party its name and had helped Lincoln win the Presidency, wrote the editorial below. Joseph Medill was my grandfather. What he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 1861 fits the case for the Cache Valley Val-ley Clarion in 1942. ELEANOR MEDILL PATTERSON The editorial, which was entitled "The Duty of Newspapers," Newspa-pers," follows: The country is engaged in a war upon which hang momentous consequences, not alone to our government considered as an impersonation of the nation's dignity and honor but to every, man, woman and child living beneath our country's flag. It is p. war for national existence, and for individual freedom, and prosperity, and happiness. It comes home to every man's " hearth; it touches him nearly in all the relations of life; is a part Of his daily thoughts and his secret prayers. For the time it is the universal business. Our interest in it is not less than our neighbor's. Our feelings are as vitally concerned, our property is as seriously imperiled by want of success now, or complete failure by and by. But we tannot regard it alone from an individual and selfish standpoint. We have duties to the public which we must discharge. By their own assumptions, or by quasi-popular consent) lead, ing and influential journals like our own are in some sort regard, ed as watchmen on the walls, to look for approach of danger toward to-ward what their readers hold dear. They have had thrust upon them the duty, not always pleasant, of acting as conservators of the public good, often at the expense of their private Interests. Men look to them not only for facts but for opinions. They do not often create, but they shape, give direction to public sentiment. senti-ment. They are the narrators of facts, the exponents of policy, the enemies of wrong. ' We need not say that The Tribune, whatever its other faults has not that of timidity. We are not of those who believe that, because the country is in danger and all private interests are threatened, or because military power overrides the civil law, it is the province of Journalism of the better sort to keep silence when incompetency undertakes the management of public affairs, af-fairs, or hold its peace when unblushing rascality under the guise of patriotism is doing its deadly work. It would be as recreant and cowardly not to speak out plainly I as on the field of battle to refuse to fire at the foe. The country, we say, is in danger. Its salvation is the first duty of every man who loves it. Parties, private interests, personal safety are nothing -when ltj bta:-d in the way of the one grand object to be accomplished. We know our duty in the emergency! and Intend honestly and fearlessly to do it. We make no claim to infallibility. Error is as common to us as to others, but in what we say and do, in this woeful crisis, we profess to be animated by motives as unselfish and by patriotism patrio-tism as pure as belong to men anywhere. We bid our contemporaries, then, who would rather be victorious vic-torious over The Tribune than over Jeff Davis, howl on. We have had the whole of them on our track in times before now and know Just the sound of their bark and the danger from their bite. We go our way, at our own time, in our own manner, in company of our own choosing, knowing as we do that vindica-r vindica-r tion will be sure to follow. We can afford to be honest, and earless, and to wait. |