But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked, seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.
On the first floor you would perceive the financial and publishing department in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureaus for folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.
On the second floor--but that you will shortly behold, and it will describe itself.
On the third floor you would discover immense magazines of material--paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every known description; and all in quantities seemingly as useless as incalculable.
On the fourth and fifth floors you would find the composition rooms, whence fly the winged words all over the world, peopled by its whole army of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases, "click--click--click" is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alone in those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add that the entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed in tubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete, and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century in Paris. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton, three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every object and apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night--through all the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive--and the journal issues with the dawn--and the workmen are relieved by constant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment to hundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusive of their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in the commercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents, sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twenty pressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundred distributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attachés and employés too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation of this army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is nine millions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand copies daily, and each number is read by half a million people, and through their influence by half a million more.
The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the second--nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of all three united equals not its tithe; and its position--its rank!--royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past ten years. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, who owes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has not been, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist, the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successful soldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France--its achievements and its continuance; Sir Bulwer Lytton says, "The pen is mightier than the sword!"