For my part,I could easily do without the post office.I think that there are very few important communications made through it.To speak critically,I never received more than one or two letters in my life-I wrote this some years ago-that were worth the postage.The penny-post is,commonly,an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.If we read of one man robbed,or murdered,or killed by accident,or one house burned,or one vessel wrecked,or one steamboat blown up,or one cow run over on the Western Railroad,or one mad dog killed,or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,-we never need read of another.One is enough.If you are acquainted with the principle,what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?To a philosopher all news,as it is called,is gossip,and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.There was such a rush,as I hear,the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival,that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure,-news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth,or twelve years,beforehand with sufficient accuracy.As for Spain,for instance,if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta,and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada,from time to time in the right proportions,-they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers,-and serve up a bullfight when other entertainments fail,it will be true to the letter,and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers:and as for England,almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year,you never need attend to that thing again,unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character.If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers,nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts,a French revolution not excepted.
What news!how much more important to know what that is which was never old!“Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei)sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news.Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him,and questioned him in these terms:What is your master doing?The messenger answered with respect:My master desires to diminish the number of his faults,but he cannot come to the end of them.The messenger being gone,the philosopher remarked:What a worthy messenger!What a worthy messenger!”The preacher,instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,-for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week,and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one,-with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon,should shout with thundering voice,“Pause!Avast!Why so seeming fast,but deadly slow?”
