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Updated: May 25, 2025
Voltaire called superstition "The Infamy," and he summoned the thinkers of the world to crush it beneath a heel of scorn. Letters, pamphlets, plays, essays, were sent out in various languages, by his own printing-presses. The wit of the man his scathing mockery were weapons no one could wield in reply.
Railways were growing at the rate of nearly one thousand miles annually. Gas had become familiar as a means of illumination in large cities. Looms and tools and printing-presses were everywhere being liberated from the slow toil of man-power. The first photographs had been taken.
Stanley in the House at that period, who insisted on the growing power of Turkey, and asserted that the Turks of that day 'were more and more imitating our manners, and emerging from their inactivity and indolence; that improvements of every kind were being introduced among them, and that even printing-presses had been lately established in their capital. That was the opinion of a Gentleman anxious to defend Turkey, and speaking in this House more than sixty years ago; we are now living sixty years later, and no one now, but the noble Lord, seems to insist upon the fact of the great and growing power of the Turkish Empire.
At the end of the year 1551 a number of Dominicans and Franciscans having been induced through his appeals to go out to the Indies, Las Casas went to Seville to see them off. For some reason they were delayed there for ten months, and during that time he was kept busy editing a number of his works, keeping two printing-presses going all the time. Las Casas must have had a wonderful constitution.
He was a capable man up to his limitations; a good executive, a devotee to duty; but he should have lived before printing-presses were invented. Also he, too, lacked imagination. He was a man who acted as if priding himself on his brusqueness of language.
In the spring of 1870, while on his way home from the Vatican Council, he wrote to Father Deshon from Assisi: "I felt as if I would like to have peopled that grand and empty convent with inspired men and printing-presses. For evidently the special battle-field of attack and defence of truth for half a century to come is the printing-press." He believed in types as he believed in pulpits.
And has the pillory or the penitentiary been the reward of that Postmaster-general? Have we not seen printing-presses destroyed; halls erected for the promotion of human freedom levelled with the dust, and consumed by fire; and wanton, unprovoked murder perpetrated with impunity, by slave-mongers?
Here was the seat of modern Greek literature; here were libraries, printing-presses, and other establishments, which indicate some advancement in refinement and knowledge.
Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it, this government cannot last.
This collected a crowd, and he refused to act in obedience to the police. A second blacksmith was sent for. As he commenced operations the crowd took his tools from him. At length, however, an entrance was effected, and a seal was put upon the printing-presses. This scene, occurring in one of the most populous thoroughfares of Paris, created intense agitation.
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