He answered:
"That's the smallest part of the matter. Think of my courage in putting other people's money into their publication!"
It was not long after that that Osgood's enterprises failed, and he retired from business as a publisher to the sorrow of every American who in any way cared for literature.
The Little Dinner to Osgood
When Osgood went to London as an agent of the Harpers, some of us gave him a farewell dinner, for which Thomas Nast designed the menu cards. When these were passed around for souvenir autographs, Edwin A. Abbey drew upon each, in connection with his signature, a caricature of himself which revealed new possibilities in his genius—possibilities that have come to nothing simply because Mr. Abbey has found a better use for his gifts than any that the caricaturist can hope for. But those of us who were present at that little Osgood dinner still cherish our copies of the dinner card on which, with a few strokes of his pencil, Abbey revealed an unsuspected aspect of his genius. In view of the greatness of his more serious work, we rejoice that he went no further than an after-dinner jest, in the exercise of his gift of caricature. Had he given comic direction to his work, he might have become a Hogarth, perhaps; as it is, he is something far better worth while—he is Abbey.
LXV
I shall write comparatively little here of the eleven years I remained in the service of the World. The experience is too recent to constitute a proper subject of freehand reminiscence. My relations with Mr. Pulitzer were too closely personal, too intimate, and in many ways too confidential to serve a purpose of that kind.
But of the men with whom my work on the World brought me into contact, I am free to write. So, too, I am at liberty, I think, to relate certain dramatic happenings that serve to illustrate the Napoleonic methods of modern journalism and certain other things, not of a confidential nature, which throw light upon the character, impulses, and methods of the man whose genius first discovered the possibilities of journalism and whose courage, energy, and extraordinary sagacity have made of those possibilities accomplished facts.
It has been more than ten years since my term of service on the World came to an end, but it seems recent to me, except when I begin counting up the men now dead who were my fellow-workmen there.