better-looking paper and still selling it further and further below
cost price.

When it was discovered how powerful the effect of suggestion upon the
readers of advertisements could be, especially over such an audience
as our modern great towns provide (a chaos, I repeat, of isolated
minds with a lessening personal experience and with a lessening
community of tradition), the value of advertising space rapidly rose.
It became a more and more tempting venture to "start a newspaper," but
at the same time, the development of capitalism made that venture more
and more hazardous. It was more and more of a risky venture to start a
new great paper even of a local sort, for the expense got greater and
greater, and the loss, if you failed, more and more rapid and serious.
Advertisement became more and more the basis of profit, and the giving
in one way and another of more and more for the 1d. or the 1/2d.
became the chief concern of the now wealthy and wholly capitalistic
newspaper proprietor.

Long before the last third of the nineteenth century a newspaper, if
it was of large circulation, was everywhere a venture or a property
dependent wholly upon its advertisers. It had ceased to consider its
public save as a bait for the advertiser. It lived (_in this phase_)
entirely on its advertisement columns.




V