Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 | Page 7

minor importance, and the German, French, Italian, Bohemian, Hebrew
and Spanish daily newspapers, is 1,540,200 copies.
Obviously, there is and must be ceaseless, incisive and merciless
competition in securing and holding circulations, as well as in the
outward statements made of individual circulations to those who
purchase advertising space. In this, as in all other forms of enterprise,
there are honest, clean-cut and business-like methods, and there are the
methods of the time-server, the trickster and the liar.
The vastly greater number of publications secure and hold their
clientage by making the best possible goods, pushing them upon public
patronage by aggressive and business-like means, and selling at the
lowest price consistent with excellence of product and fairness alike to
producer and consumer. But of the baser sort there are always enough
to make rugged paths for those who walk uprightly, and to contribute to
instability of values on the one hand, and on the other to flooding the
country with publications which the home and the world would be
better without. Every great city has more of the rightly made and
rightly sold papers than of the other sort, and the business man, the
working man, the professional man, the family, no matter of what taste,
or political faith, or economic bias, or social status, or financial plenty
or paucity, can have the daily visits of newspapers which are able,
brilliant, comprehensive, clean and honest. But all the time, these men
and families will have pressed upon their attention and patronage, by
every device and artifice of the energetic and more or less unscrupulous
publisher, other papers equally able and brilliant and comprehensive,
but bringing also their burden of needless sensationalism and

mendacity, undue expansion of all manner of scandal, amplification of
every detail and kind of crime, and every phase of covert innuendo or
open attack upon official doing and private character--the whole
infernal mass procured, and stimulated and broadcast among the people
by the "business end of it," with the one and only intent of securing and
holding circulation.
Take a representative and pertinent example. Eight years ago there
were in New York ten or eleven standard newspapers, as ably and
inclusively edited and as energetically and successfully conducted,
business-wise, as they are now. Even at their worst they were decently
mindful of life's proprieties and moralities and they throve by
legitimate sale of the most and best news and the best possible
elucidation and discussion thereof. The father could bring the paper of
his choice to his breakfast table with no fear that his own moral sense
and self-respect might be outraged, or that the face of his wife might be
crimsoned and the minds of his children befouled. But there came from
out of the West new men and new forces, quick to see the larger
opportunity opened in the very center of five millions of people, and
almost in a night came the metamorphosis of the old World into the
new. It was deftly given out that existing conditions were inadequate to
the better deserts of the Knickerbocker, the Jersey-man, and the Yankee,
and that a new purveyor of more highly seasoned news and a more
doughty champion of their rights and interests was hither from the land
of life and movement--at two cents per copy. There was a panic in New
York newspaper counting rooms, and prices tumbled in two days from
the three and four cents of fair profit to the two and three cents of bare
cost or less. The new factors in demoralization cared nothing for
competition in prices or legitimate goods, for they had other ideas of
coddling the dear people. Ready to their purpose lay disintegrated
Liberty, waiting for a rock upon which to plant her feet and raise her
torch, and the new combination between the world, the flesh and the
devil, waiting and ready for access to the pockets of the public, was
only too ready to set up Liberty and itself at one stroke, if only the joint
operation could be done without expense to itself. The people said,
"What wonderful enterprise!" "What a generous spirit!" The
combination, with tongue in cheek and finger laid alongside nose, said
to itself as it saw its circulation spring in one bound from five figures

into six, "Verily we've got there! for these on the Hudson are greater
gudgeons than are they on the Mississippi." From then until now, with
an outward semblance and constant pretense of serving the people; with
blare of trumpet and rattle of drum; with finding Stanley, who never
had been lost; with scurrying peripatetic petticoats around the globe;
with all manner of unprofessional and illegitimate devices; with
so-called "contests" and with all manner of "schemes" without limit in
number, kind, or degree; with every cunningly