Footnote 50: Enclosed in the following letter.
Viscount Palmerston to Queen Victoria.
THE TIMES
Windsor Castle, 30th October 1861.
Viscount Palmerston presents his humble duty to your Majesty, and begs to state that when he received a few days ago from Lord Russell the Memorandum which your Majesty intended for him, and which he returned to Lord Russell, he wrote to Mr Delane in accordance with your Majesty's wishes, and he has this morning received the accompanying answer.
Viscount Palmerston would, however, beg to submit that an erroneous notion prevails on the Continent as to English newspapers.
The newspapers on the Continent are all more or less under a certain degree of control, and the most prominent among them are the organs of political parties, or of leading public men; and it is not unnatural that Governments and Parties on the Continent should think that English newspapers are published under similar conditions.
But in this country all thriving newspapers are commercial undertakings, and are conducted on commercial principles, and none others are able long to maintain an existence. Attempts have often been made to establish newspapers to be directed by political men, and to be guided by the same considerations by which those men would govern their own conduct, but such papers have seldom succeeded. The Peelite Party tried some years ago such an experiment with the Morning Chronicle, but after spending a very large sum of money on the undertaking they were obliged to give it up. The Times is carried on as a large commercial enterprise, though, of course, with certain political tendencies and bias, but mainly with a view to profit upon the large capital employed.
The actual price at which each copy of the newspaper is sold barely pays the expense of paper, printing, and establishment; it is indeed said that the price does not repay those expenses. The profit of the newspaper arises from the price paid for advertisements, and the greater the number of advertisements the greater the profit. But advertisements are sent by preference to the newspaper which has the greatest circulation; and that paper gets the widest circulation which is the most amusing, the most interesting, and the most instructive. A dull paper is soon left off. The proprietors and managers of the Times therefore go to great expense in sending correspondents to all parts of the world where interesting events are taking place, and they employ a great many able and clever men to write articles upon all subjects which from time to time engage public attention; and as mankind take more pleasure in reading criticism and fault-finding than praise, because it is soothing to individual vanity and conceit to fancy that the reader has become wiser than those about whom he reads, so the Times, in order to maintain its circulation, criticises freely everybody and everything; and especially events and persons, and Governments abroad, because such strictures are less likely to make enemies at home than violent attacks upon parties and persons in this country. Foreign Governments and Parties ought therefore to look upon English newspapers in the true point of view, and not to be too sensitive as to attacks which those papers may contain.