Only a single further step remains to be taken. That step was recently foreshadowed in a leader in which the Sun intimated that the time was not far distant in which it would reject more advertising than it would accept. With a daily circulation of fifty or a hundred thousand more, there is little doubt that the Sun would find it necessary to limit the advertisers as the reporters and other writers for its columns are limited, each to a space to be determined by the public interest in his subject.
It will be a long stride in the progress of intellectual as distinguished from commercial journalism, and the Sun will probably be the first to make it, thus distancing the successors of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley in the great sweepstakes for recognition as the Journal of the Future.
JAMES GORDON BENNETT, SR.
HORACE GREELEY
HENRY J. RAYMOND
It must be remembered, in recalling the failure of Dana’s dream of a paper sans advertising, that his mind was not usually the port of vain dreams. He was a practical man, with more business sense than any other editor of his time, Bennett alone excepted. In him imagination had not swallowed arithmetic, and there is no possible doubt that he had good reason to believe in the practicability of the program he so candidly outlined to his readers. It was part and parcel of his faith in a four-page newspaper—a faith so strong, so well grounded on results, that for the first twenty years of the Dana régime the Sun never appeared in more than four pages, except in emergencies.
In the end, of course, the scheme was beaten by the very excellence of its originator’s qualities. The Sun, by its popularity, drew more and more advertising. By its good English, its freedom from literary shackles, and the spirit of its staff, it attracted more and more writers of distinction, each unwilling to be denied his place in the Sun. Dana always had unlimited space for a good story, just as the cat had an insatiable appetite for a bad one; and thus, through his own genius, he destroyed his own dream, but not without having almost proved that it was possible of realisation.