for instance, to take in foreigners, and give them
tolerable food and a liberal education. Here
it is otherwise. Nearly all families occupy one
floor of a building, renting just rooms enough for
the family, so that their apartments are not elastic
enough to take in strangers, even if they desire to
do so. And generally they do not. Munich
society is perhaps chargeable with being a little
stiff and exclusive. Well, we advertised in the
“Neueste Nachrichten.” This is the
liberal paper of Munich. It is a poorly printed,
black-looking daily sheet, folded in octavo size,
and containing anywhere from sixteen to thirty-four
pages, more or less, as it happens to have advertisements.
It sometimes will not have more than two or three
pages of reading matter. There will be a scrap
or two of local news, the brief telegrams taken from
the official paper of the day before, a bit or two
of other news, and perhaps a short and slashing editorial
on the ultramontane party. The advantage of printing
and folding it in such small leaves is, that the size
can be varied according to the demands of advertisements
or news (if the German papers ever find out what that
is); so that the publisher is always giving, every
day, just what it pays to give that day; and the reader
has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does
not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals
of unchangeable form cannot always be used profitably.
This little journal was started something like twenty
years ago. It probably spends little for news,
has only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded
with advertisements, which are inserted cheap, and
costs, delivered, a little over six francs a year.
It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand.
There is another little paper here of the same size,
but not so many leaves, called “The Daily Advertiser,”
with nothing but advertisements, principally of theaters,
concerts, and the daily sights, and one page devoted
to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America,
of which country its readers must get the most extraordinary
and frightful impression. The “Nachrichten”
made the fortune of its first owner, who built himself
a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth.
It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens;
and I can see that it is piling up another fortune
for its present owner. The Germans, who herein
show their good sense and the high state of civilization
to which they have reached, are very free advertisers,
going to the newspapers with all their wants, and finding
in them that aid which all interests and all sorts
of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled, in
these days, to seek in the daily journal. Every
German town of any size has three or four of these
little journals of flying leaves, which are excellent
papers in every respect, except that they look like
badly printed handbills, and have very little news
and no editorials worth speaking of. An exception
to these in Bavaria is the “Allgerneine Zeitung”