mes Author:Associated Press Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MELVILLE E. STONE AS I HAVE KNOWN HIM A PERSONAL TRIBUTE By Frank B. Noyes President of The Associated Press TOO often we wait until a man has passed a... more »way before we say the things that are always in our hearts concerning him, and so the opportunity of recording, even haltingly, as I must, the regard and deep affection for Melville E. Stone that the long years of close association have brought to me is peculiarly welcome, as the present year of his service to the cause he has labored for finds him serving as greatly as the first. When, in 1893, Western newspaper men, headed by Victor F. Lawson, resolved to make their fight for a press service that should belong to its newspaper members and be controlled by them and by them alone; that should be co-operative and non-profiting-making, they turned to Melville E. Stone, not then engaged in active newspaper work, and laid on him the heavy burden of leading in this battle for a principle. In all the world, in my belief, there was no man so fitted for this great duty as the man then selected. It is not my function to attempt to tell the epic story of the giant conflict between the organization then formed, founded on the belief that the safety of the press and of the people required that the news service of the American newspapers should be controlled by thenewspapers, and that other organization, then dominant, which had for its purpose only the making of profits. That struggle ended in the complete triumph of the co-operative principle, with The Associated Press admittedly the greatest news gathering and distributing organization in the world. Nor am I to tell of his insistent fight through years for the principle of Property Right in News—for the right of the news-gatherer to the fruit of his labor. The records of th...« less