CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY—NEWSPAPERS AND NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING.

journals is very different from that pursued here, everything on such establishments as those of the New York Herald, the Tribune, and the Times, being sacrificed to news. This is more particularly the case with regard to the Herald, which has an immense circulation and great numbers of highly-priced advertisements, most of which are unfortunately regarded more in connection with the amount of money they produce to the proprietor than in reference to any effect, moral or otherwise, they may have on the community. It is the boast of American journalists that they have papers in obscure towns many hundreds of miles inland, any one of which contains in a single issue as much news—news in the strictest meaning of the word—as the London Times does in six. And, singular as it may at first sight seem, there is a great element of truth about the statement, the telegraph being used in the States with a liberality which would drive an English proprietor to the depths of black despair. The Associated Telegraph Company seem to enjoy a monopoly, and to exercise almost unlimited powers; and not long ago they almost completely ruined a journal of standing in California by refusing to transmit intelligence to it because its editor and proprietor had taken exception to the acts of some members of the Associated Telegraph Company’s staff, and it was only on receipt of a most abject apology from the delinquents that the most autocratic power in the States decided to reinstate the paper on its list. This Telegraph Company charges very high rates, and the only visible means by which this system of journalism is successfully carried out is that of advertisements, which are comparatively more plentiful in these papers than in the English, and are charged for at considerably higher rates. Some of these newspapers, notably a small hebdomadal called the San Francisco Newsletter, go in for a deliberate system of blackmailing, and have no hesitation in acknowledging that their pages, not the advertisement portions, but their editorial columns, are to be bought for any purpose—for the promotion of blasphemy, obscenity, atheism, or any other “notion”—at a price which is regulated according to the editor’s opinion of the former’s