Death of Newspapers

Here is a fearful mortality among periodicals. An epidemic has broken out which has brouQ-ht to the last gasp many of the dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. During the last few weeks, scores of these have died of cholera infantum. Only a little while ago, they came forth with flaming prospectus and long list of eminent contributors; but the places that knew them once know them no more.

Men succeedingin nothine else have coneluded it to be a providential indication that they should publish a paper. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sunk, and every issue of the majority of the temperance, Sunday-school, religious, and political papers of the country is a plunge into debt from which they are hopingsome purchaser will lift them out. It is a constant question in the community where religious newspapers go to when they die? We know where the basely partisan go to, without asking.

The mania is fearful. Many of our literary friends are uneasy till they have invested their last five thousand dollars in printer’s ink. Nine-tenths of them may whistle for their money; but the dog will not come back, having found out some other master. Why all this giving up of the ghost among newspapers?

Some of them died for lack of being anathematized. Nothlnof ever succeeds in this country without being well cursed. If a man, or book, or periodical go forth unassaulted, ruin is nio-h. There is nothincr diat so decidedly lifts a thing up before the public gaze as the end of a bayonet. The neutral paper almost always fails, because It clears the scorn of parties and churches. Kicks and cuffs are an indispensable inheritance. The more valuable the quarry, the more frequent the blasting. You cannot make wine without the crushing of the clusters. The most successful periodicals of the day are those that have been most violently hounded.

Some of these papers died for lack of brains. A man may plead law or preach the gospel with less intellect than is required for the conduct of a paper. The editor must understand something of everything. He wants more than a scissors and a botde of mucilage. If he merely retail the ideas of others, the public will prefer to go up and get the thing at the wholesale establishment. He must be able, with strong and entertaining pen, to discuss governments, religions, educational enterprises, social changes, books, amusements, men, institutions, everything. He must have strength to take a thought on the end of his pen and fling It a thousand miles, till It strikes within an inch of the point at which he aimed it.

Lack of capital has thrown others. Ink, paper, press, type, printers, editorial salaries, contributors’ fees, postal expenses, rent, machinery, necessary repairs, are taking down many large fortunes. The literary enterprise is often crushed under Its own cylinders, Is drowned in Its own Ink, is chewed up with Its own type, is shrouded In Its own paper, has its epitaph In Its own columns. The wider the circulation of the illy-managed newspaper, the more certain the doom. He who attempts to publish a paper without pockets full of ready cash, publishes his own discomfiture. Call on the witness-stand the hundreds of men who are now settling up the bills for their extinct newspaper. Every mail brings to us the parting bow of retiring publishers, with pockets turned wrong-side out, from which hungry creditors are trying to milk out another shilling. Many of them have died of lack of room. At this very time we have so many good religious papers on our table, we think we shall once in a while have to take up the London Punch to keep ourselves enough worldly to attend to our secular duties. We fear that some of these religious papers will eat each other up, so that there will be nothing left of them save a few remaining columns of advertised medicines and shaving-soap. New York city has ten evening papers; the number of morning papers no one has had time to count. We wish them all success; but it would certainly be wise if the three hundred new periodicals which are about to be started would look before they leap.

We wonder not at the ambition that aims for the editorial chair. All other modes of affecting the public mind are narrow and weak compared with it. The pen is the lever that moves the world, and the ink-roller of the printing-press the battering-ram that smites into the dust the walls of ignorance and sin. But the press is a strong team to drive; and one must be sure of the harness and the wheels, or, coming along a steep place, there will be a capsize, and a wreck from under which the literary adventurers will not have strength to draw themselves. Phaeton’s attempt to drive the chariot of the sun ended in a grand smash-up.