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

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 devised form of appeal to curiosity and cupidity--from then until now that combination has been struggling to hold and has held an audience of the undiscriminating and the unthinking. But, further, and worse, a short-sighted instinct of self-preservation has led other papers to follow somewhat at a distance in this demoralizing race. None of them has gone to such lengths, but the tendency to literary, mental and moral dissipation induced by a hitherto unknown form of competition has swerved and largely recast the methods