day lifts up his voice or his pen and offers inducements to the public to bet. Can any one of such journals say to us, ‘I am holier than thou, because I sell my prophecies for a penny, and thou insertest the advertisements of men who want a dozen stamps for theirs’? But the whole policy of objecting to certain classes of advertisements is absurd. If the proprietor of a newspaper were to inquire, even superficially, into the bona fides of all the announcements he makes every day, his journal could not be conducted. If he were even to confine his attention to the examination of the prospectuses of joint-stock companies—and this will appeal to Mr Anderson—he would be in the Bankruptcy Court in six months. Suppose the directors of any one of hundreds of bubble concerns which every year carry away the public with ‘bogus’ announcements were to appear before the manager of the Times with their prospectuses, what would they think if he said, ‘Gentlemen, before I insert this you must prove to me that it is not a gross swindle;’ and how would they proceed to do so?”
We admit to a weakness for reading the sporting papers, and can therefore vouch for the truth of what the Sportsman says about its own action. It would have been well, however, if other papers had been as careful, for we happen to know that all the contemporaries of the journal from which we have quoted did not come out with quite such clean hands. Some not only continued to insert the advertisements, despite numerous complaints, but actually doubled the usual tariff price to the thieves. This seems to have been a pretty general proceeding when the discretionary movement was at its height, all papers which continued to insert the specious swindles after the exposures had begun being very careful to be