clientage by making the best possible goods, pushing them upon public
patronage by aggressive and business-like means, and selling at the
lowest price consistent with excellence of product and fairness alike
to producer and consumer. But of the baser sort there are always
enough to make rugged paths for those who walk uprightly, and to
contribute to instability of values on the one hand, and on the other
to flooding the country with publications which the home and the world
would be better without. Every great city has more of the rightly made
and rightly sold papers than of the other sort, and the business man,
the working man, the professional man, the family, no matter of what
taste, or political faith, or economic bias, or social status, or
financial plenty or paucity, can have the daily visits of newspapers
which are able, brilliant, comprehensive, clean and honest. But all
the time, these men and families will have pressed upon their
attention and patronage, by every device and artifice of the energetic
and more or less unscrupulous publisher, other papers equally able and
brilliant and comprehensive, but bringing also their burden of
needless sensationalism and mendacity, undue expansion of all manner
of scandal, amplification of every detail and kind of crime, and every
phase of covert innuendo or open attack upon official doing and
private character--the whole infernal mass procured, and stimulated
and broadcast among the people by the "business end of it," with the
one and only intent of securing and holding circulation.

Take a representative and pertinent example. Eight years ago there
were in New York ten or eleven standard newspapers, as ably and
inclusively edited and as energetically and successfully conducted,
business-wise, as they are now. Even at their worst they were decently
mindful of life's proprieties and moralities and they throve by
legitimate sale of the most and best news and the best possible