The proprietors of other morning papers cheerfully pay twelve dollars. Therefore, the office of the Journal of Commerce is what printers term a rat office—and the term “rat,” with the followers of the same profession with Faust, Franklin, and Stanhope, is a most odious term.
The “pork-barrel” was foreshadowed in an item printed when the Sun was just a month old:
At the close of the present year the Treasury of the nation will contain twelve million dollars. This rich and increasing revenue will probably be a bone of contention at the next session of Congress.
At the end of its first month the Sun was getting more and more advertising. Its news was lively enough, considering the times. Rum, the cholera in Mexico, assassinations in the South, the police-court, the tour of Henry Clay, and poems by Walter Scott were its long suit. The circulation of the little paper was now about twelve hundred copies, and the future seemed promising, even if Mr. Day did print, at suspiciously frequent intervals, articles inveighing against the debtor’s-prison law.
The Astor House—now half a ruin—was at first to be called the Park Hotel, for the Sun of October 29, 1833, announced editorially:
THE PARK HOTEL—Mr. W. B. Astor gives notice that he will receive proposals for building the long-contemplated hotel in Broadway, between Barclay and Vesey Streets.
An advertisement which the Sun saw fit to notice editorially was inserted by a young man in search of a wife—“a young woman who understands the use of the needle, and who is willing to be industrious.” The editorial comment was:
The advertisement was handed to us by a respectable-looking young man, and of course we could not refuse to publish it—though if we were in want of a wife we think we should take a different course to obtain one.
Sometimes the police items, flecked with poetry, and presumably written by Wisner, were tantalizingly reticent, as:
Maria Jones was accused of stealing clothing, and committed. Certain affairs were developed of rather a singular and comical nature in relation to her.