the outports, whilst those for the Ministerial journals were

allowed to proceed. This might have crushed a weaker man, but it
did not crush Walter. Of course he expostulated. He was

informed at the Home Secretary's office that he might be
permitted to receive his foreign papers as a favour. But as this

implied the expectation of a favour from him in return, the
proposal was rejected; and, determined not to be baffled, he

employed special couriers, at great cost, for the purpose of
obtaining the earliest transmission of foreign intelligence.

These important qualities--enterprise, energy, business tact, and
public spirit--sufficiently account for his remarkable success.

To these, however, must be added another of no small importance--
discernment and knowledge of character. Though himself the head

and front of his enterprise, it was necessary that he should
secure the services and co-operation of men of first-rate

ability; and in the selection of such men his judgment was almost
unerring. By his discernment and munificence, he collected round

him some of the ablest writers of the age. These were frequently
revealed to him in the communications of correspondents--the

author of the letters signed "Vetus" being thus selected to write
in the leading columns of the Paper. But Walter himself was the

soul of The Times. It was he who gave the tone to its articles,
directed its influence, and superintended its entire conduct with

unremitting vigilance.
Even in conducting the mechanicalarrangements of the paper--a

business of no small difficulty--he had often occasion to
exercise promptness and boldness of decision in cases of

emergency. Printers in those days were a rather refractory class
of work men, and not unfrequently took advantage of their

position to impose hard terms on their employers, especially in
the daily press, where everything must be promptly done within a

very limited time. Thus on one occasion, in 1810, the pressmen
made a sudden demand upon the proprietor for an increase of

wages, and insisted upon a uniform rate being paid to all hands,
whether good or bad. Walter was at first disposed to make

concessions to the men; but having been privately informed that a
combination was already entered into by the compositors, as well

as by the pressmen, to leave his employment suddenly, under
circumstances that would have stopped the publication of the

paper, and inflicted on him the most serious injury, he
determined to run all risks, rather than submit to what now

appeared to him in the light of an extortion.
The strike took place on a Saturday morning, when suddenly, and

without notice, all the hands turned out. Mr. Walter had only a
few hours' notice of it, but he had already resolved upon his

course. He collected apprentices from half a dozen different
quarters, and a few inferiorworkmen, who were glad to obtain

employment on any terms. He himself stript to his shirt-sleeves,
and went to work with the rest; and for the next six-and-thirty

hours he was incessantly employed at case and at press. On the
Monday morning, the conspirators, who had assembled to triumph

over his ruin, to their inexpressible amazement saw The Times
issue from the publishing office at the usual hour, affording a

memorable example of what one man's resoluteenergy may
accomplish in a moment of difficulty.

The journal continued to appear with regularity, though the
printers employed at the office lived in a state of daily peril.

The conspirators, finding themselves baffled, resolved upon
trying another game. They contrived to have two of the men

employed by Walter as compositors apprehended as deserters from
the Royal Navy. The men were taken before the magistrate; but

the charge was only sustained by the testimony of clumsy,
perjured witnesses, and fell to the ground. The turn-outs next

proceeded to assault the new hands, when Mr. Walter resolved to
throw around them the protection of the law. By the advice of

counsel, he had twenty-one of the conspirators apprehended and
tried, and nineteen of them were found guilty and condemned to

various periods of imprisonment. From that moment combination
was at an end in Printing House Square.

Mr. Walter's greatest achievement was his successful application
of steam power to newspaper printing. Although he had greatly

improved the mechanicalarrangements after he took command of the
paper, the rate at which the copies could be printed off remained

almost stationary. It took a very long time indeed to throw off,
by the hand-labour of pressmen, the three or four thousand copies

which then constituted the ordinary circulation of The Times. On
the occasion of any event of great public interest being reported

in the paper, it was found almost impossible to meet the demand
for copies. Only about 300 copies could be printed in the hour,

with one man to ink the types and another to work the press,
while the labour was very severe. Thus it took a long time to

get out the daily impression, and very often the evening papers
were out before The Times had half supplied the demand.

Mr. Walter could not brook the tedium of this irksome and
laborious process. To increase the number of impressions, he

resorted to various expedients. The type was set up in
duplicate, and even in triplicate; several Stanhope presses were

kept constantly at work; and still the insatiable demands of the
newsmen on certain occasions could not be met. Thus the question

was early forced upon his consideration, whether he could not
devise machinery for the purpose of expediting the production of

newspapers. Instead of 300 impressions an hour, he wanted from
1500 to 2000. Although such a speed as this seemed quite as

chimerical as propelling a ship through the water against wind
and tide at fifteen miles an hour, or running a locomotive on a

railway at fifty, yet Mr. Walter was impressed with the
conviction that a much more rapid printing of newspapers was

feasible than by the slow hand-labour process; and he endeavoured
to induce several ingeniousmechanical contrivers to take up and

work out his idea.
The principle of producing impressions by means of a cylinder,

and of inking the types by means of a roller, was not new. We
have seen, in the precedingmemoir, that as early as 1790 William

Nicholson had patented such a method, but his scheme had never
been brought into practical operation. Mr. Walter endeavoured to

enlist Marc Isambard Brunel--one of the cleverest inventors of
the day--in his proposed method of rapid printing by machinery;

but after labouring over a variety of plans for a considerable
time, Brunel finally gave up the printing machine, unable to make

anything of it. Mr. Walter next tried Thomas Martyn, an
ingenious young compositor, who had a scheme for a self-acting

machine for working the printing press. He was supplied with the
necessary funds to enable him to prosecute his idea; but Mr.

Walter's father was opposed to the scheme, and when the funds
became exhausted, this scheme also fell to the ground.

As years passed on, and the circulation of the paper increased,
the necessity for some more expeditious method of printing became

still more urgent. Although Mr. Walter had declined to enter
into an arrangement with Bensley in 1809, before Koenig had

completed his invention of printing by cylinders, it was
different five years later, when Koenig's printing machine was

actually at work. In the precedingmemoir, the circumstances
connected with the adoption of the invention by Mr. Walter are

fully related; as well as the announcement made in The Times on
the 29th of November, 1814--the day on which the first newspaper

printed by steam was given to the world.
But Koenig's printing machine was but the beginning of a great

new branch of industry. After he had left this country in
disgust, it remained for others to perfect the invention;

although the ingenious German was entitled to the greatest credit
for having made the first satisfactorybeginning. Great

inventions are not brought forth at a heat. They are begun by
one man, improved by another, and perfected by a whole host of