dollars a year, and it is increasing. Supposing that only one half of
this revenue is appropriated to the College, it is still, we believe,
the largest endowment in the country for an educational purpose. The
means of the College are therefore ample. To make those means
effective in the highest degree, some mode must be devised by which
the politics of the city shall cease to influence the choice of
Directors. In other words, "Girard College must be taken out of
politics." The Board of Directors should, perhaps, be a more permanent
body than it now is. At the earliest possible moment a scheme of
instruction should be agreed upon, which should remain unchanged, in
its leading features, long enough for it to be judged by its results.
The President must be clothed with ample powers, and held responsible,
not for methods, but results. He must be allowed, at least, to
nominate all his assistants, and to recommend the removal of any for
reasons given; and both his nominations and his recommendations of
removal, so long as the Directors desire to retain his services,
should be ratified by them. He must be made to feel strong in his
place; otherwise, he will be tempted to waste his strength upon the
management of committees, and general whitewashing. Human nature is so
constituted, that a gentleman with a large family will not willingly
give up an income of three thousand dollars a year, with lodging in a
marble palace. If he is a strong man and an honorable, he will do it,
rather than fill a post the duties of which an ignorant or officious
committee prevent his discharging. If he is a weak or dishonest man,
he will cringe to that committee, and expend all his ingenuity in
making the College show well on public days. It might even be well, in
order to strengthen the President, to give him the right of appeal to
the Mayor and Councils, in case of an irreconcilable difference of
opinion between him and the Directors. Everything depends upon the
President. Given the right President, with power enough and time
enough, and the success of the College is assured. Given a bad
President, or a good one hampered by committees, or too dependent upon
a board, and the College will be the reproach of Philadelphia.
It is a question with political economists, whether, upon the whole,
such endowments as this are a good or an evil to a community. There is
now a considerable party in England, among whom are several clergymen
of the Established Church, who think it would be better for England if
every endowment were swept away, and thus to each succeeding
generation were restored the privilege of supporting all its poor,
caring for all its sick, and educating all its young. Dr. Chalmers
appears to have been inclined to an opinion like this. It will be
long, however, before this question becomes vital in America. Girard
College must continue for generations to weigh heavily on
Philadelphia, or to lighten its burdens. The conduct of those who have
charge of it in its infancy will go far to determine whether it shall
be an argument for or against the utility of endowments. Meanwhile, we
advise gentlemen who have millions to leave behind them not to impose
difficult conditions upon the future, which the future may be unable
or unwilling to fulfil; but either to bestow their wealth for some
object that can be immediately and easily accomplished, or else
imitate the conduct of that respectable and public-spirited man who
left five pounds towards the discharge of his country's debt.
[Footnote 1: The facts which follow I received from the lips and from
the papers of this revered man, now no more.--J.P.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Duane.]
JAMES GORDON BENNETT AND THE NEW YORK HERALD
A few years ago it seemed probable that the people of the United
States would be supplied with news chiefly through the agency of
newspapers published in the city of New York. We were threatened with
a paper despotism similar to that formerly exercised in Great Britain
by the London Times; since, when one city furnishes a country with
newspapers, one newspaper is sure, at length, to gain such a
predominance over others that its proprietor, if he is equal to his
position, wields a power greater than ought to be intrusted to an
individual. There have been periods when the director of the London
Times appeared to be as truly the monarch of Great Britain as Henry
VIII. once was, or as William Pitt during the Seven Years' War. It
was, we believe, the opinion of the late Mr. Cobden, which Mr.
Kinglake confirms, that the editor of the London Times could have
prevented the Crimean War. Certainly he conducted it. Demosthenes did
not more truly direct the resources of Athens against Philip, than did
this invisible and anonymous being those of the British Empire against
Russia. The first John Walter, who was to journalism what James Watt
was to the steam-engine, had given this man daily access to the ear of
England; and to that ear he addressed, not the effusions of his own
mind, but the whole purchasable eloquence of his country. He had
relays of Demosthenes. The man controlling such a press, and fit to
control it, can bring the available and practised intellect of his
country to bear upon the passions of his countrymen; for it is a fact,
that nearly the whole literary talent of a nation is at the command of
any honorable man who has money enough, with tact enough. The editor
who expends fifty guineas a day in the purchase of three short essays
can have them written by the men who can do them best. What a power is
this, to say three things every morning to a whole nation,--to say
them with all the force which genius, knowledge, and practice united
can give,--and to say them without audible contradiction! Fortunate
for England is it that this power is no longer concentrated in a
single man, and that the mighty influence once wielded by an
individual will henceforth be exerted by a profession.
We in America have escaped all danger of ever falling under the
dominion of a paper despot. There will never be a Times in America.
Twenty years ago the New York news and the New York newspaper reached
distant cities at the same moment; but since the introduction of the
telegraph, the news outstrips the newspaper, and is given to the
public by the local press. It is this fact which forever limits the
circulation and national importance of the New York press. The New
York papers reach a village in Vermont late in the afternoon,--six,
eight, ten hours after a carrier has distributed the Springfield
Republican; and nine people in ten will be content with the brief
telegrams of the local centre. At Chicago, the New York paper is forty
hours behind the news; at San Francisco, thirty days; in Oregon,
forty. Before California had been reached by the telegraph, the New
York newspapers, on the arrival of a steamer, were sought with an
avidity of which the most ludicrous accounts have been given. If the
news was important and the supply of papers inadequate, nothing was
more common than for a lucky newsboy to dispose of his last sheets at
five times their usual price. All this has changed. A spirited local
press has anticipated the substance of the news, and most people wait
tranquilly for the same local press to spread before them the
particulars when the tardy mail arrives. Even the weekly and
semi-weekly editions issued by the New York daily press have probably
reached their maximum of importance; since the local daily press also
publishes weekly and semi-weekly papers, many of which are of high
excellence and are always improving, and have the additional
attraction of full local intelligence. If some bold Yankee should
invent a method by which a bundle of newspapers could be shot from New
York to Chicago in half an hour, it would certainly enhance the
importance of the New York papers, and diminish that of the rapidly
expanding and able press of Chicago. Such an invention is possible;
nay, we think it a probability. But even in that case, the local news,
and, above all, the local advertising, would still remain as the basis
of a great, lucrative, honorable, and very attractive business.
We believe, however, that if the local press were annihilated, and
this whole nation lived dependent upon the press of a single city,
still we should be safe from a paper despotism; because the power of
the editorial lessens as the intelligence of the people in-creases.
The prestige of the editorial is gone. Just as there is a party in
England who propose the omission of the sermon from the church service
as something no longer needed by the people, so there are journalists
who think the time is at hand for the abolition of editorials, and the
concentration of the whole force of journalism upon presenting to the
public the history and picture of the day. The time for this has not
come, and may never come; but our journalists already know that
editorials neither make nor mar a daily paper, that they do not much
influence the public mind, nor change many votes, and that the power
and success of a newspaper depend finally upon its success in getting
and its skill in exhibiting the news. The word _newspaper_ is the
exact and complete description of the thing which the true journalist
aims to produce. The news is his work; editorials are his play. The
news is the point of rivalry; it is that for which nineteen twentieths
of the people buy newspapers; it is that which constitutes the power
and value of the daily press; it is that which determines the rank of
every newspaper in every free country.
No editor, therefore, will ever reign over the United States, and the
newspapers of no one city will attain universal currency. Hence the
importance of journalism in the United States. By the time a town has
ten thousand inhabitants, it usually has a daily paper, and in most
large cities there is a daily paper for every twenty thousand people.
In many of the Western cities there are daily newspapers conducted
with great energy, and on a scale of expenditure which enables them to
approximate real excellence. Many of our readers will live to see the
day when there will be in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati,
and San Francisco daily newspapers more complete, better executed, and
produced at greater expense than any newspaper now existing in the
United States. This is a great deal to say, in view of the fact, that,
during the late war, one of the New York papers expended in war
correspondence alone two thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, we
believe it. There will never be _two_ newspapers in any one city that
can sustain such an expenditure, but in fifteen years from, to-day
there will be one, we think, in each of our great cities, and besides
that one there will be four or five struggling to supplant it, as well
as one or two having humbler aims and content with a lowlier position.
It is plain that journalism will henceforth and forever be an
important and crowded profession in the United States. The daily
newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities
of modern civilization. The steam-engine is not more essential to us.
The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general
life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole; so that
we can almost say, that those who neither read newspapers nor converse
with people who do read them are not members of the human
_family_;--though, like the negroes of Guinea, they may become such in
time. They are beyond the pale; they have no hold of the electric
chain, and therefore do not receive the shock.
There are two mornings of the year on which newspapers have not
hitherto been published in the city of New York,--the 5th of July, and
the 2d of January. A shadow appears to rest on the world during those
days, as when there is an eclipse of the sun. We are separated from
our brethren, cut off, lost, alone; vague apprehensions of evil creep
over the mind. We feel, in some degree, as husbands feel who, far from
wife and children, say to themselves, shuddering, "What things _may_
have happened, and I not know it!" Nothing quite dispels the gloom
until the Evening Post--how eagerly seized--assures us that nothing
very particular has happened since our last. It is amusing to notice
how universal is the habit of reading a morning paper. Hundreds of
vehicles and vessels convey the business men of New York to that
extremity of Manhattan Island-which may be regarded as the
counting-house of the Western Continent. It is not uncommon for every
individual in a cabin two hundred feet long to be sitting absorbed in
his paper, like boys conning their lessons on their way to school.
Still more striking is it to observe the torrent of workingmen pouring
down town, many of them reading as they go, and most of them provided
with a newspaper for dinner-time, not less as a matter of course than
the tin kettle which contains the material portion of the repast.
Notice, too, the long line of hackney-coaches on a stand, nearly every
driver sitting on his box reading his paper. Many of our Boston
friends have landed in New York at five o'clock in the morning, and
ridden up town in the street cars, filled, at that hour, with women
and boys, folding newspapers and throwing off bundles of them from
time to time, which are caught by other boys and women in waiting.
Carriers are flitting in every direction, and the town is alive with
the great business of getting two hundred thousand papers distributed
before breakfast.
All this is new, but it is also permanent. Having once had daily
papers, we can never again do without them; so perfectly does this
great invention accord with the genius of modern life. The art of
journalism is doubtless destined to continuous improvement for a long
time to come; the newspapers of the future will be more convenient,
and better in every way, than those of the present day; but the art
remains forever an indispensable auxiliary to civilization. And this
is so, not by virtue of editorial essays, but because journalism
brings the events of the time to bear upon the instruction of the
time. An editorial essayist is a man addressing men; but the skilled
and faithful journalist, recording with exactness and power the thing
that has come to pass, is Providence addressing men. The thing that
has actually happened,--to know that is the beginning of wisdom. All
else is theory and conjecture, which may be right and may be wrong.
While it is true that the daily press of the city of New York is
limited by the telegraph, it has nevertheless a very great, an
unapproached, national importance. We do not consider it certain that
New York is always to remain the chief city of the United States; but
it holds that rank now, and must for many years. Besides being the
source of a great part of our news, it was the first city that
afforded scope for papers conducted at the incredible expense which
modern appliances necessitate. Consequently its daily papers reach the
controlling minds of the country. They are found in all reading-rooms,
exchanges, bank parlors, insurance-offices, counting-rooms, hotels,
and wherever else the ruling men of the country congregate. But, above
all, they are, and must be, in all newspaper offices, subject to the
scissors. This is the chief source of their importance. Not merely
that in this way their contents are communicated to the whole people.
The grand reason why the New York papers have national importance is,
that it is chiefly through them that the art of journalism in the
United States is to be perfected. They set daily copies for all
editors to follow. The expenditure necessary for the carrying on of a
complete daily newspaper is so immense, that the art can only be
improved in the largest cities. New York is first in the field; it has
the start of a quarter of a century or more; and it therefore devolves
upon the journalists of that city to teach the journalists of the
United States their vocation. It is this fact which invests the press
of New York with such importance, and makes it so well worth
considering.
It is impossible any longer to deny that the chief newspaper of that
busy city is the New York Herald. No matter how much we may regret
this fact, or be ashamed of it, no journalist can deny it. We do not
attach much importance to the fact that Abraham Lincoln, the late
lamented President of the United States, thought it worth while,
during the dark days of the summer of 1864, to buy its support at the
price of the offer of the French mission. He was mistaken in supposing
that this paper had any considerable power to change votes; which was
shown by the result of the Presidential election in the city of New
York, where General McClellan had the great majority of thirty-seven
thousand. Influence over opinion no paper can have which has itself no
opinion, and cares for none. It is not as a vehicle of opinion that
the Herald has importance, but solely as a vehicle of news. It is for
its excellence, real or supposed, in this particular, that eighty
thousand people buy it every morning. Mr. Lincoln committed, as we
cannot help thinking, a most egregious error and fault in his purchase
of the editor of this paper, though he is in some degree excused by
the fact that several leading Republicans, who were in a position to
know better, advised or sanctioned the bargain, and leading
journalists agreed not to censure it. Mr. Lincoln could not be
expected to draw the distinction, between the journalist and the
writer of editorials. He perceived the strength of this
carrier-pigeon's pinions, but did not note the trivial character of
the message tied to its leg. Thirty or forty war correspondents in the
field, a circulation larger than any of its rivals, an advertising
patronage equalled only by that of the London Times, the popularity of
the paper in the army, the frequent utility of its maps and other
elucidations,--these things imposed upon his mind; and his wife could
tell him from personal observation, that the proprietor of this paper
lived in a style of the most profuse magnificence,--maintaining costly
establishments in town and country, horses, and yachts, to say nothing
of that most expensive appendage to a reigning house, an heir
apparent.
Our friends in the English press tell us, that the Herald was one of
the principal obstacles in their attempts to guide English opinions
aright during the late struggle. Young men in the press would point to
its editorials and say:
"This is the principal newspaper in the Northern States;
this is the Times of America; can a people be other than
contemptible who prefer such a newspaper as this to journals
so respectable and so excellent as the Times and Tribune,
published in the same city?" "As to (American) journalism,"
says Professor Goldwin Smith, "the New York Herald is always kept
before our eyes." That is to say, the editorial articles in the
Herald; not that variety and fulness of intelligence which often
compelled men who hated it most to get up at the dawn of day to buy
it. A paper which can detach two or three men, after a battle, to
collect the names of the killed and wounded, with orders to do only
that, cannot lack purchasers in war time. Napoleon assures us that the
whole art of war consists in having the greatest force at the point of
contact. This rule applies to the art of journalism; the editor of the
Herald knew it, and had the means to put it in practice.
Even here, at home, we find two opinions as to the cause of the
Herald's vast success as a business. One of these opinions is
this,--the Herald takes the lead because it is such a bad paper. The
other opinion is,--the Herald takes the lead because it is such a good
paper. It is highly important to know which of these two opinions is
correct; or, in other words, whether it is the Herald's excellences as
a newspaper, or its crimes as a public teacher, which give it such
general currency. Such success as this paper has obtained is a most
influential fact upon the journalism of the whole country, as any one
can see who looks over a file of our most flourishing daily papers. It
is evident that our daily press is rapidly becoming Heraldized; and it
is well known that the tendency of imitation is to reproduce all of
the copy excepting alone that which made it worth copying. It is
honorable to the American press that this rule has been reversed in
the present instance. Some of the more obvious good points of the
Herald have become universal, while as yet no creature has been found
capable of copying the worst of its errors.
If there are ten bakers in a town, the one that gives the best loaf
for sixpence is sure, at last, to sell most bread. A man may puff up
his loaves to a great size, by chemical agents, and so deceive the
public for a time; another may catch the crowd for a time by the
splendor of his gilt sheaf, the magnitude of his signs, and the
bluster of his advertising; and the intrinsically best baker may be
kept down, for a time, by want of tact, or capital, or some personal
defect. But let the competition last thirty years! The gilt sheaf
fades, the cavities in the big loaf are observed; but the ugly little
man round the corner comes steadily into favor, and all the town, at
length, is noisy in the morning with the rattle of his carts. The
particular caterer for our morning repast, now under consideration,
has achieved a success of this kind, against every possible obstacle,
and under every possible disadvantage. He had no friends at the start,
he has made none since, and he has none now. He has had the support of
no party or sect. On the contrary, he has won his object in spite of
the active opposition of almost every organized body in the country,
and the fixed disapproval of every public-spirited human being who has
lived in the United States since he began his career. What are we to
say of this? Are we to say that the people of the United States are
competent to judge of bread, but not of newspapers? Are we to say that
the people of the United States prefer evil to good? We cannot assent
to such propositions.
Let us go back to the beginning, and see how this man made his way to
his present unique position. We owe his presence in this country, it
seems, to Benjamin Franklin; and he first smelt printer's ink in
Boston, near the spot where young Ben Franklin blackened his fingers
with it a hundred years before. Born and reared on the northeastern
coast of Scotland, in a Roman Catholic family of French origin, he has
a French intellect and Scotch habits. Frenchmen residing among us can
seldom understand why this man should be odious, so French is he. A
French naval officer was once remonstrated with for having invited him
to a ball given on board a ship of war in New York harbor. "Why, what
has he done?" inquired the officer. "Has he committed murder? Has he
robbed, forged, or run away with somebody's wife?" "No." "Why then
should we not invite him?" "He is the editor of the New York Herald."
"Ah!" exclaimed the Frenchman,--"the Herald! it is a delightful
paper,--it reminds me of my gay Paris." This, however, was thirty
years ago, when Bennett was almost as French as Voltaire. He was a
Frenchman also in this: though discarding, in his youth, the doctrines
of his Church, and laughing them to scorn in early manhood, he still
maintained a kind of connection with the Catholic religion. The whole
of his power as a writer consists in his detection of the evil in
things that are good, and of the falsehood in things that are true,
and of the ridiculous in things that are important. He began with the
Roman Catholic Church,--"the holy Roman Catholic Church," as he once
styled it,--adding in a parenthesis, "all of us Catholics are devilish
holy." Another French indication is, that his early tastes were
romantic literature _and_ political economy,--a conjunction very
common in France from the days of the "philosophers" to the present
time. During our times of financial collapse, we have noticed, among
the nonsense which he daily poured forth, some gleams of a superior
understanding of the fundamental laws of finance. He appears to have
understood 1837 and 1857 better than most of his contemporaries.
In a Catholic seminary he acquired the rudiments of knowledge, and
advanced so far as to read Virgil. He also picked up a little French
and Spanish in early life. The real instructors of his mind were
Napoleon, Byron, and Scott. It was their fame, however, as much as
their works, that attracted and dazzled him. It is a strange thing,
but true, that one of the strongest desires of one of the least
reputable of living men was, and is, to be admired and held in lasting
honor by his fellow-men. Nor has he now the least doubt that he
deserves their admiration, and will have it. In 1817, an edition of
Franklin's Autobiography was issued in Scotland. It was his perusal of
that little book that first directed his thoughts toward America, and
which finally decided him to try his fortune in the New World. In May,
1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed at Halifax, with
less than five pounds in his purse, without a friend on the Western
Continent, and knowing no vocation except that of book-keeper.