In New York, the large daily papers which you see in the hands of everyone are: the Tribune, the Times, the Herald, the World, the Sun, and the Star.
The first two are those most read by the cultivated classes; the most popular are the two following.
Five or six important newspapers appear in the afternoon: the Post (the most respectable and respected of all American organs); the Commercial Advertiser, an excellent literary, political, and financial publication; the Mail and Express; the Telegram, the Sun, and the World.
Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago possess newspapers in no way second in importance to those of New York. Of such are the Globe, the Post, the Advertiser, the Herald, the Transcript, and the Journal, of Boston; the Ledger and the Press, of Philadelphia; the Tribune, the Herald, the Inter-Ocean, and the Journal, of Chicago. Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, and many other towns, have also newspapers of the first importance.
Every little town of a thousand to fifteen hundred inhabitants has its two newspapers, one democratic, the other republican. For lively reading, take up these papers during the electoral struggle which terminates with the installation of a new President at the White House. The names of some of them will suffice to give you an idea of the style of the contents: very favourite names are the Paralyser, the Rustler, the Cyclone, the Prairie Dog, the Bazoo, the Lucifer, the Bundle of Sticks, the Thunderer, the Earthquake. I saw and read a copy of the sheet which rejoiced in the name of Bundle of Sticks. The first article contained advice to a certain Joseph Müller, who, instead of working, had taken up street preaching and house-to-house prayer. "We give Joseph Müller a fortnight to find some honourable employment. If at the end of that time he is still leading an idle life, we will find an exalted position for him." The joke makes one shudder, when one thinks that, if Joseph should turn a deaf ear to the warning, he is quite sure to be hung by his townsmen to the highest branch of some tree in the town.
Manners will tone down in the West, as they have in the East, and in twenty years the Thunderer and the Avalanche will give place to the Times and the Tribune.
The characteristic of new societies is freedom of speech as well as of action. I read in some Thunderer the following lines about the editor of the Lightning, the other newspaper of the town: "We wish to use moderation, and to keep within the limits of good breeding. We will only go so far as to say that personally he is a sneak; and that as a journalist he is a liar and a scoundrel." The Lightning replies in the same strain, and the public gets amusement for the moderate sum of one halfpenny.
Many of these papers of Kentucky, Texas, and other Western States may be paid for in kind. I extract the following from the Herald, of Hazel Green (Kentucky):—
"NO EXCUSE FOR IGNORANCE.
How you may get the 'Herald' for a year without money.