The Rights of Lawyers and Editors.

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I am amazed and indignant. Do you not mistake your own position as well as mine? What gives you, sitting in private and writing anonymously, authority to render "judgment" upon me? I am not disputing your right, as a collector of news, to publish any facts concerning any body; but you have, certainly, no greater right to publish your opinions respecting the character or conduct of a private person than you would to publish them to his face in a private company; and you must know that you would not have ventured to say what is contained in that paragraph to my face in any company whatever. It seems to be imagined in some quarters that as soon as one can get the control of types and write anonymously, he may publish whatever he pleases about whomsoever he will. For many of the conductors of the public press I have great respect, as for intelligent, cultivated, large-hearted men; but there are others, as you must know, who are "hostes humani generis," and who evidently fancy that as soon as they can fill the columns of a newspaper they may put off the character of a gentleman and take on that of ruffians. Such, I hope, is not your opinion; it certainly is not mine. So much for your position.

Mr. Bowles, in reply, assumed this position for the journalist:

Of course I can not accept the limitations which you put upon journalism. The gathering and publication of facts is but one part of its vocation. To express opinions is a higher and larger share of its duties. The conduct of public men before the public is the legitimate subject for their discussion. The lawyer before the court, as the minister in his pulpit, the executive in his chair of state, and the legislator in his hall of assembly-all these are alike public men, and their conduct in their public vocations the proper theme of both journalistic report and discussion. Nor is such arraignment the province of the Press alone. Without invading the sanctities of private character, or the courtesies of personal life, reason and the habits of civilization give to every man the right to arraign and discuss the public or professional conduct of his fellow-men. The politician on the stump discusses his fellow-politicians; the minister in his pulpit summons his fellows for inconsistency, or unreason, or infidelity; so the lawyer arraigns his fellow-lawyers in court or in public gathering; and each, too, crosses the line of his own profession, and disputes the conduct of men of the other professions. There is no court more thoroughly established than this of public opinion, and no right more finally settled, or more largely improved, than this of the free discussion of the public and professional conduct of all our fellow-men; and I am surprised to find you disputing it.

Neither the lawyer nor the editor, in their columns of argument pro and con, convinced the other; and, so far as the opinions of these two gentlemen affect the public mind, it still remains in doubt. whether a lawyer has a right to make any one with sufficient money his client, or the editor the right to hold the lawyer up to public gaze for the crimes and conduct of his client. It is probable that a lawyer with a notoriously bad client will suffer in public estimation, and the editor's criticism be sustained. Such will always be the vox populi.

The Republican has a large circulation for an interior publication. It claims 25,000. No paper out of Boston has so large a circula

This is the proud kept as a standing

tion in New England. "The first daily paper in the oil regions." boast of the Titusville Morning Herald, and is notice where other papers insert their motto. The Herald was established on the 14th of June, 1865. It already claims the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Pennsylvania outside of Phila

delphia and Pittsburg, and that it is the largest daily newspaper in the same commonwealth with the same two exceptions. If this be so, the oil regions have bubbled up to some purpose, and is another of the marvelous instances of the fabulous growth of a populous and wealthy community in the United States. The Herald is a largesized single-sheet paper, pretty well filled with advertisements, and full of news received by telegraph and otherwise. It publishes a monthly statistical review of the petroleum business of that oleaginous section.

Cheap Literature.

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CHAPTER XXX V.

CHEAP LITERATURE.

NOVELS MADE INTO NEWS AND SOLD BY NEWS-BOYS.-THE BROTHER JONATHAN AND NEW WORLD. THE BOSTON NOTION.-COMPETITION FOR THE LAST NOVEL BY THE LAST STEAMER. DICKENS'S AMERICAN NOTES AND THE QUEEN'S SPEECH.

ABOUT the time the Atlantic began to be traversed by steam-ships, several large papers, published weekly, were established in New York and Boston. They were entitled the Boston Notion, and the New World and Brother Jonathan, of New York. They were literary sheets, and made news of literature. Park Benjamin, an associate of Horace Greeley and Henry J. Raymond on the New Yorker in 1838, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, George Roberts, and Jonas Winchester, were the publishers. John Neal, Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, Griswold, and Benjamin were the chief editors; but they impressed Bulwer, James, Dickens, Ainsworth, Lever, Sheridan Knowles, Lover, and all the writers of note, into their service nolens volens. They made war, by their enterprise, on the Harpers and other large book publishers, and brought literature into the market at reduced prices. They were a sensation in New York. What the New York Herald, New York Sun, Boston Times, and Philadelphia Ledger endeavored to do with the political, commercial, criminal, financial, and marine movements of the day, these energetic litterateurs and publishers attempted to accomplish with Bulwer's Zanoni, Dickens's American Notes, and Knowles's Love-Chase. Zanoni was published by the Harpers, the New World, and Brother Jonathan in the spring of 1842. It sold for 12 cents, and in some instances at 64 cents. The Harpers and a few other booksellers would issue such works as these, taking their own time, and charging $1 and $1 50 for a copy. though there was no copyright law, these book publishers had as much of a monopoly as if Bulwer, James, and Dickens wrote exclusively for them.

These weekly sheets, by the enterprise of their proprietors, changed all this. They made the same arrangements to get early copies of the last novel by the coming steamers as the Herald or Tribune made to obtain the latest London Times or Liverpool Mail. An entire novel would be published on the day of its reception. They would give Bulwer's Night and Morning, complete, in an ex

tra, as the Herald would an important speech of O'Connell, or Peel, or Palmerston, or the Queen. Such a feat was considered a marvel in typography. These novels, plays, and romances, in monster folios and double sheets, were sold in the streets by the news-boys at ten and twelve and a half cents each. On the 11th of December, 1839, the Herald received by the steamer Liverpool an advance copy of Sheridan Knowles's play of Love-Chase, which was published entire in that paper, and sold with the news of the day for two cents! Ann and Nassau Streets, where the New World and Brother Jonathan were published, were scenes of wild and extraordinary excitement on the arrival of a steam-ship with a fresh novel. "Rival of the Britannia. 'Ere's Dickens's Notes-only ten cents." These papers obtained large circulations by this sort of enterprise. It was, however, too sensational to last. They were too dependent on foreign brains. Immense quantities were sent all over the country, especially to the Southern States; and as other matter than novels and plays was published, some of which was considered objectionable and contraband in a Southern political and social point of view, there was trouble and difficulty with the authorities in that section of the country. One of the Boston papers, for instance, contained the following paragraph in November, 1842:

The agent of the New World at Charleston, S. C., writes a piteous letter, in which he states that he had been held to bail in the sum of $1000, on the complaint of the South Carolina Association, for having sold a certain number of our journal containing a discourse by the late William Ellery Channing on Emancipation in the West Indies.

Newspaper dealers and agents at the South are now free from such troubles. Any publication or individual can circulate in the South, from Horace Greeley and Benjamin F. Butler to the AntiSlavery Standard and Wendell Phillips.

These monster weekly papers commenced, in a simple way, the system and style of advertising that is at the present time so widely and extensively carried out in this country by Bonner and others. It was a moderate beginning. Instead of the entire columns and pages occupied in typographical display which is now indulged in, Jonas Winchester, of the New World, headed the advertisement of the number issued on the 4th of February, 1843, as follows:

THE NEW WORLD.-A GREAT NUMBER.-TWO SPLENDID ENGRAVINGS.

This issue contained Sheridan Knowles's "thrilling tale" of My Grandfather's Dream, and Lamon Blanchard's My Dream at Hop Lodge.

One number of the Boston Notion was thus announced:

Another rich Number.-The Boston Notion, L. F. Tasistro, Editor. This journal, so justly celebrated for its high-toned literary criticisms and racy articles, is fast gaining the largest circulation of any weekly in this country.

The Authorities and Cheap Literature.

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So great and sharp was the competition among these large literary news sheets that the Herald uttered the following predictions relative to them in March, 1843:

The terrible contest and competition now going on among the publishers of cheap literature will produce two or three results: 1st, the ruin of all the publishers; 2d, the fortunes of all the vendors in the large cities; and, 3d, the spread of literary taste among the people. All these results are positive and certain.

These predictions, have been fully verified. In 1845 the New World was absorbed by the Emporium, and Park Benjamin became an editor in Baltimore in 1846. He was the father of cheap literature in the United States. The Boston Notion ceased to exist, and its publisher opened a first-class hotel in New York, and its editor became chief translator in the State Department at Washington, and afterwards, becoming partially blind, he astonished every one with his extraordinary memory in reciting entire plays of Shakspeare. John Neal, who was chief editor of the Brother Jonathan in 1843, still lives, with his brain as active as ever, in Portland, Maine, mixed up in railroads and literature.

This cheap literature circulated through the mails at low rates of postage, going, even when printed on extra sheets, as regular newspapers. This was an additional advantage the weekly-paper publisher enjoyed over the old book publishers; but in April, 1843, instructions were issued from the Post-office Department to charge pamphlet postage on all the cheap publications of the day issued as extras. The postage on the extras of the New World and Brother Jonathan was two and a half cents a sheet. On the following July these publications were shut out of Canada, in accordance with the provisions of the copyright law, by the restrictions of the authorities of that province, through the efforts, it was asserted at the time, of Bulwer, Dickens, James, and other English authors.

These official acts were serious blows to the cheap publications, but the taste of the public for the productions of first-class writers had spread and become standard, and was seen afterwards in the improved class of literary papers issued in the United States.