Julian Ralph saw more of the world, and made more copy out of what he saw, than any other newspaperman. While still on the Sun he was making books out of the material he picked up on his assignments. In the early nineties, while still on the Sun staff, he made two tours for Harper’s Magazine and wrote “On Canada’s Frontier,” “Our Great West,” and “Chicago and the World’s Fair,” the last of which was the official book of the Columbian Exposition. After his experiences in the Boer War he wrote “Towards Pretoria,” “War’s Brighter Side” (with Conan Doyle), and “An American with Lord Roberts.” His other books are “Alone in China,” “Dixie; or, Southern Scenes and Sketches,” “People We Pass,” and a novel, “The Millionairess.” He was the author of the “German Barber” sketches, which appeared almost weekly in the Sun for a long time, and which are remembered as among the genuine examples of real humour in dialect. During the Boer War, Ralph joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, and after returning from South Africa he made his home in London until his death in 1903.
A tradition about Ralph, indicating the pleasure that his articles gave to his own colleagues as well as to the public, concerns one of the great football-games of the eighties. John Spears discovered the picturesqueness of the Yale-Princeton games, usually played on Thanksgiving Day, and the Sun featured them year after year. Reporters hungered for the job, for it meant not only money, but the opportunity to write a fine story.
When Ralph’s turn came he wrote such a good article that the copy-desk let it run for five columns. Lord admired it, Clarke was enthusiastic over it, and the other men in the office took turns in reading the story in the proofs, so happily was it turned. It was not until the first edition was off the press that an underling, who cared more for football than for literature, suggested that the story ought to contain the score of the game. Ralph had forgotten to state it, and all the desks, absorbed in the thrill of the article itself, had overlooked the omission.
Ralph reported for the Sun the outrages of the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal-fields. After the execution of two of the outlaws for murder, he was bold enough to follow their bodies back to their village where they had lived, in order to describe the wake. He was warned to leave the place before sunset, on pain of death, and he went, for there was nothing to be gained by staying.
On another assignment, a murder mystery, the relatives of the victim, who were ignorant and superstitious people, suspected Ralph of being the murderer. When he came into their house to see the body, they demanded that he should touch it, their belief being that the body would turn over, or the wounds reopen, if touched by the murderer. There was an implied threat of death for the reporter if he refused, but Ralph walked out without complying.
Ralph was a believer in the sixth sense of journalists, that inexplicable gift by which a man, and particularly a newspaperman, comes to a clairvoyant knowledge that something is about to happen—in other words, an exalted hunch. John B. Bogart, city editor in Ralph’s Sun days, had this sense, and he called it a “current of news.” He thus described its workings to Ralph:
One day I was walking up Broadway when suddenly a current of news came up from a cellar and enveloped me. I felt the difference in the temperature of the air. I tingled with the electricity or magnetism in the current. It seemed to stop me, to turn me around, and to force me to descend some stairs which reached up to the street by my side.
I ran down the steps, and as I did so a pistol-shot sounded in my ears. One man had shot another, and I found myself at the scene upon the instant.
While acting as the legislative correspondent of the Sun at Albany, Ralph was in the habit of walking to one of the local parks to enjoy the view across a valley southwest of the city. One day, while gazing across the valley, he was seized with a desire to go to the mountains in the distance beyond it. The impulse remained with him for two days, and then, on the third day, he read of a news happening that had occurred in the mountains on the very day when the current of news had thrilled him.
Ralph reported the Dreyfus court-martial at Rennes, in France. One morning he could not sleep after five o’clock. As he was on his way to court he said to George W. Steevens, of the London Daily Mail, who was walking with him: