"Good. Where are they gone?"
"No one knows."
"No matter. Send a good stirring column all the same."
"What's-his-name, the financier, has made off," ticks the wire from Chicago.
"A column. Send report, and start on scent of the fugitive."
When the telegraph has ceased ticking, and the crowd of reporters have departed, the chief editor, like a ship's captain, the last to leave the deck, works on. He reads over everything—yes, everything; sifts, corrects, cuts down, adds to, puts all in order, and towards two o'clock in the morning gives the order to print, and goes home.
But once more all this is nothing. It is in the Sunday's issue that you have the crowning feat of journalistic enterprise: thirty or thirty-two pages of telegrams, articles, essays on politics, the drama, literature, pictures, the fashions, anecdotes, bons mots, interviews, stories for children, poetry, biographies, chats on science, the whole illustrated with portraits, sketches of interesting places mentioned in the text, caricatures, etc. All this for the sum of three halfpence.
And this is not all. How send these mammoth newspapers throughout the different States of the Union? How? Oh, that is very simple. The New York World and the New York Herald have special trains. Tell me if it is not enough to take one's breath away. But, you will ask, how can a paper publish such a number for three halfpence? From thirty to forty columns of advertisements, such is the solution of the mystery.
I admire several large papers, notably the New York Herald, which put their immense publicity at the disposition of lean purses. Persons in want of servants, for example, have to pay 25 cents. a line for advertising; but male servants in search of a situation only pay 10 cents. a line, and women 5 cents. This is philanthropy of the right sort, chivalrous philanthropy.