of trumpet and rattle of drum; with finding Stanley, who never had been lost; with scurrying peripatetic petticoats around the globe; with all manner of unprofessional and illegitimate devices; with so-called “contests” and with all manner of “schemes” without limit in number, kind, or degree; with every cunningly devised form of appeal to curiosity and cupidity—­from then until now that combination has been struggling to hold and has held an audience of the undiscriminating and the unthinking.  But, further, and worse, a short-sighted instinct of self-preservation has led other papers to follow somewhat at a distance in this demoralizing race.  None of them has gone to such lengths, but the tendency to literary, mental and moral dissipation induced by a hitherto unknown form of competition has swerved and largely recast the methods of every New York daily save only the Tribune, Times, Commercial Advertiser, and Evening Post, while the converse side of securing business clientage is illustrated in a way that would be amusing if it were not pathetic, by that abnormal and fantastic cross between news and pietetics which mails and expresses itself to the truly good.  These are forms of competition which the business end of legitimately conducted newspapers is compelled to meet.  In a certain way these methods do succeed, but how, and how long and how much shall they succeed except by unsettling the mental and moral poise of the people, and by setting a new and false pace for publishers everywhere whose thoughts take less account of means than of ends?  Which shall we hold in higher esteem and in our business patronage—­Manton Marble and Hurlbut, gentlemen, scholarly, wise leaders, conscientious teachers, with barely living financial income; or their successors, parvenus, superficial, meretricious, false guides, time-serving leaders, a thousand dollars a day of clear profit, housed in the tower of Babel?

Considered in the large, the circulation side of the American newspaper has many indefensible aspects.  As “nothing succeeds like success,” or the appearance of success, the prestige of not a few newspapers is ministered unto by rotund and deceptive representations of circulation.  Then, as few can live, much less profit, on their circulations alone, it becomes greatly important to make the advertiser see circulations through the large end of the telescope, and so the fine art of telling truth without lying is a live and perennial study in many counting rooms.  Discussing the circulation question not long ago with the head of a leading religious paper, he told me that the number of copies he printed was a thing that he never stated definitely, because the publishers of the other religious newspapers lied so about their circulations that he would do himself injustice if he were to tell the truth about his own.  The secular papers should set an example for their religious brethren, but they do not, for from many of them there is lying—­systematic,